A System Architecture for Software-Defined Industrial Internet of Things

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel software-defined system architecture for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) that enhances reliability, security, and QoS using advanced networking technologies and a case study validation.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive SD-IIoT architecture integrating WirelessHART, WebSocket, CoAP, and SDN to address key challenges in IIoT systems.

Findings

Effective QoS management with CoAP and SDN

Improved reliability and security in IIoT systems

Successful validation through computer case study

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been a driving force of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) advancement in the process control and manufacturing industry. The emergence of IIoT opens great potential for the ubiquitous field device connectivity and manageability with an integrated and standardized architecture from low-level device operations to high-level data-centric application interactions. This technological development requires software definability in the key architectural elements of IIoT, including wireless field devices, IIoT gateways, network infrastructure, and IIoT sensor cloud services. In this paper, a novel software-defined IIoT (SD-IIoT) is proposed in order to solve essential challenges in a holistic IIoT system, such as reliability, security, timeliness scalability, and quality of service (QoS). A new IIoT system architecture is proposed based on the latest networking technologies such as WirelessHART, WebSocket, IETF constrained application protocol (CoAP) and software-defined networking (SDN). A new scheme based on CoAP and SDN is proposed to solve the QoS issues. Computer experiments in a case study are implemented to show the effectiveness of the proposed system architecture.