A Survey on Industrial Internet of Things: A Cyber-Physical Systems Perspective

The vision of Industry 4.0, otherwise known as the fourth industrial revolution, is the integration of massively deployed smart computing and network technologies in industrial production and manufacturing settings for the purposes of automation, reliability, and control, implicating the development of an Industrial Internet of Things (I-IoT). Specifically, I-IoT is devoted to adopting the IoT to enable the interconnection of anything, anywhere, and at any time in the manufacturing system context to improve the productivity, efficiency, safety, and intelligence. As an emerging technology, I-IoT has distinct properties and requirements that distinguish it from consumer IoT, including the unique types of smart devices incorporated, network technologies and quality-of-service requirements, and strict needs of command and control. To more clearly understand the complexities of I-IoT and its distinct needs and to present a unified assessment of the technology from a systems' perspective, in this paper, we comprehensively survey the body of existing research on I-IoT. Particularly, we first present the I-IoT architecture, I-IoT applications (i.e., factory automation and process automation), and their characteristics. We then consider existing research efforts from the three key system aspects of control, networking, and computing. Regarding control, we first categorize industrial control systems and then present recent and relevant research efforts. Next, considering networking, we propose a three-dimensional framework to explore the existing research space and investigate the adoption of some representative networking technologies, including 5G, machine-to-machine communication, and software-defined networking. Similarly, concerning computing, we again propose a second three-dimensional framework that explores the problem space of computing in I-IoT and investigate the cloud, edge, and hybrid cloud and edge computing platforms. Finally, we outline particular challenges and future research needs in control, networking, and computing systems, as well as for the adoption of machine learning in an I-IoT context.