Emerging Technologies in Industrial Communication II

Dear Colleagues,
Industrial communication is facing one of the most important transformation of the last decades. Approaches, such as Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), one of the key technology driving the so called Industry 4.0 paradigm, are pushing industrial communication to their limits. Yet-to-come services will be offered in the automation scenario by industrial devices through a pervasive internet connection for pushing data into cloud systems. Currently, most efforts are in the design and development of solutions enabling horizontal interoperability among different applications domains. With respect to traditional IoT applications, time-related performance are still fundamental in IIoT. Consider for example, motion control applications. In such a domain, the real-time behaviour of the communication system, and time synchronization mechanisms, are necessary preconditions. At the same time, the IoT approach in the industrial automation world, is paving the way to innovative services for improving efficiency, reliability and availability of industrial processes and products. The IIoT takes advantage of the collection of large amount of data by means of (wireless) links connecting smart sensors attached to the system of interest.

This issue welcomes theoretical papers, methodological studies and empirical research (or combination thereof) on the time synchronization mechanism in industrial applications, industrial internet of things, wireless sensor network, reliability and availability, protocols, algorithms and scheduling mechanisms to fulfil timing and reliability requirements dictated by industrial applications.
The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Industrial Internet of Thing,
• Cyber Physical Systems,
• Distributed measurement systems,
• Time synchronization mechanisms,
• Real-time indoor localization systems,
• Performance evaluation and modelling of communication systems and architectures,
• Software Defined Networking (SDN),
• Cloud and Fog computing in future factories,
• Real-time communication standards,
• Deterministic medium access schemes and real-time scheduling,
• In-vehicle real-time communications,
• Cooperating robot sensor networks.

Dr. Stefano Rinaldi
Dr. Gaetano Patti
Guest Editors

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