Industry 4.0 Vision for the Supply of Energy and Materials

As noted already, various wireless technologies and standards provide connectivity in industrial systems. To choose the appropriate wireless technology for an industrial IoT application, different factors should be considered. Tables 1.1and 1.2present the main technical differences among the aforementioned technologies. The comparison considers the PHY and MAC layer features along with various performance measures that each technology aims to fulfill. Such comparative study would assist in specifying potential wireless technologies for an industrial application.

Table 1.1 Comparison of Wireless Technologies: Short-Range Technologies.

Table 1.2 Comparison of Wireless Technologies: Long-Range Technologies.

Section 1.4 elaborated on different wireless technologies and standards that serve a variety of industrial applications. However, these wireless technologies are not sufficient for industrial applications that utilize data-intensive machines. In this context, cellular and mobile networks open up new opportunities in industrial applications. Cellular networks are empowered with ubiquitous presence, reliable communication links, widespread coverage, and mobility. These characteristics enhance operations of local networks and tailor them precisely to industrial applications for better leveraging the potentials of Industry 4.0 [123].

Historically, the primary focus of cellular communication was human-centric communication. With the rapid development of embedded devices and smart equipment, new communication standards were introduced to focus not only on the connectivity of people but also on communications between devices and machines in IoT. In this context, MTC has been proposed as a compelling solution that offers connectivity for diverse growing smart services such as smart meters, remote patient monitoring, smart manufacturing, boat tracking, and other similar cases [124, 125]. Within the cellular context, MTC is usually known as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication [57]. We will use MTC and M2M interchangeably in this chapter.

The MTC landscape uses both wireless and fixed networks to provide Internet access for a number of diverse applications [126]. This leads to diverse network protocols and data formats that exhibits different behavior in MTC systems [127]. MTC suffers from some fundamental limitations such as low coverage, and limited scalability. Cellular systems such as 4G, LTE, and 5G could be recognized as alternative technologies that extensively support MTC networks.

In this section, we first focus on a review of the current status of MTC in 3GPP cellular standards. We shall subsequently review LTE, 4G, and 5G and their enhanced features for communication in industrial environments.

3GPP characterized MTC as a form of data communication between machines in an autonomous manner that does not necessarily require human intervention [128]. MTC denotes two communications scenarios: (1) communication between MTC devices and MTC servers (e.g., in utility smart metering); and (2) direct communication between MTC devices without intermediate server (e.g., IoT) [128]. Although MTC could utilize different types of radio access technologies [129], MTC solutions based on mobile access technologies are of vital importance because cellular MTC offers viable benefits such as mobility, roaming support, robustness against single point of failures, and immediate and reliable data delivery [126, 128]. Moreover, scalability and ease of deployment in cellular MTC can be accomplished via an untethered method. Cellular MTC also excels the ability of connecting devices to the core enterprise systems through a standardized application programming interface (API), in a scalable, real-time, and secure way.