State-of-Art of Network Architectures and Protocols for Industrial IoT

Dear Colleagues,

Internet services and networking architectures have steadily evolved to accommodate technological changes and the development of novel services in the Internet. With the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is now a complete entanglement of the Internet into different realms of our daily lives. The massive number of cyber-physical systems are increasing the information (data) exchanged over the Internet, bringing challenges that need to be addressed via better support of aspects such as security, mobility, and intelligence (behavior learning and anticipation).

While technology is evolving into a human-centric perspective, about 60% of the worldwide population still does not have Internet access. Worldwide Internet access will dramatically change via the support of smart satellite constellations.

To accommodate these new changes, by being able to support a massive number of interconnected cyber-physical systems over both large and long distances, and into new realms (such as space), there is the need to re-think networking architectures and protocols and to evaluate their capability of handling current challenges (mobility, security, privacy, critical application support, and automated massive onboarding of IoT devices). There is also the need to debate on future challenges, and to address requirements to assist in the future design of networking architectures and protocols.

This Special Issue focuses on the debate on aspects concerning networking architectures and protocols for a global IoT, applicable both to Industrial and consumer devices, as well as the challenges that may arise in future environments. The Special Issue envisions the following main aspects:

• Architectural and evolutionary vision of IoT networking protocols and architectures, including the support of multi-party communication (decentralized communication), QoS, integrated security, mobility, and intelligence (context-awareness, behavior learning, and inference).
• Architectural integration aspects, in particular solutions that address a better interaction between applications and infrastructure, e.g., derived from semantic technologies.
• Edge networking aspects for IoT optimization, such as distribution/orchestration of networking functions to best support data processing and aggregation, mobility, resilience, and power saving.
• Network performance measurements that assist in understanding the performance of the current available communication protocols in a variety of scenarios, including industrial IoT scenarios.
• Design and evaluation of scenarios exploiting architectural, user-centric, and content-centric paradigms, e.g., information centric networking.
• Design and evaluation of decentralized edge architectures, e.g., involving end-user devices (far edge) and near edge devices for industrial environments.
• Deterministic wireless solutions and scenarios, e.g., application of wireless solutions in closed-loop industrial environments, as well as long-range communication scenarios.
• Protocol interoperability discussion and evaluation, in particular solutions that can assist in the automated support of data interoperability.
• Integration of AI on decentralized Edge environments, e.g., methods to optimize AI, decentralized AI approaches applicable both to the edge (including end-user devices) and cloud; and evaluation of AI solutions/ML models and their suitability to advanced scenarios, e.g., for massive mobile IoT support.

Dr. Rute C. Sofia
Guest Editor

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• network architectures
• network protocols
• IoT
• AI
• decentralized internet services