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The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and principles in industrial environments is known as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIoT concept aims to integrate various industrial devices, sensors, and actuators for collection, storage, monitoring, and process automation. Due to the complexity of IIoT environments, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The main challenges in developing an IIoT solution are represented by the diversity of sensors and devices, connectivity, edge/fog computing, and security. This paper proposes a distributed and customized IioT (Industrial Internet of Things) framework for the interaction of things from the industrial environment. This framework is distributed on the fog nodes of the IIoT architecture proposed, and it will have the possibility to interconnect local things (with low latency) or global things (with a latency generated by the Internet network). To demonstrate the functionality of the proposed framework, it is included in the fog nodes presented in other paper. These fog nodes allow the integration of CANOpen networks into an IioT architecture. The most important advantages of the proposed architecture are its customizability and the fact that it allows decision operations to be carried out at the edge of the network to eliminate latency due to the Internet.

In the design and development process of fog computing solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we need to take into consideration the characteristics of the industrial environment that must be met. These include low latency, predictability, response time, and operating with hard real-time compiling. A starting point may be the reference fog architecture released by the OpenFog Consortium (now part of the Industrial Internet Consortium), but it has a high abstraction level and does not define how to integrate the fieldbuses and devices into the fog system. Therefore, the biggest challenges in the design and implementation of fog solutions for IIoT is the diversity of fieldbuses and devices used in the industrial field and ensuring compliance with all constraints in terms of real-time compiling, low latency, and predictability. Thus, this paper proposes a solution for a fog node that addresses these issues and integrates industrial fieldbuses. For practical implementation, there are specialized systems on chips (SoCs) that provides support for real-time communication with the fieldbuses through specialized coprocessors and peripherals. In this paper, we describe the implementation of the fog node on a system based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZU3EG A484 SoC.

The development of the smart building concept and building automation field is based on the exponential evolution of monitoring and control technologies. Residents of the smart building must interact with the monitoring and control system. A widely used method is specific applications executed on smartphones, tablets, and PCs with Bluetooth connection to the building control system. At this time, smartphones are increasingly used in everyday life for payments, reading newspapers, monitoring activity, and interacting with smart homes. The devices used to build the control system are interconnected through a specific network, one of the most widespread being the Building Automation and Control Network (BACnet) network. Here, we propose the use of the BACnet Application Layer over Bluetooth. We present a proposal of a concept and a practical implementation that can be used to test and validate the operation of the BACnet Application Layer over Bluetooth.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept that has revolutionized the use of new technologies in everyday life. The economic impact of IoT becoming very important, and it began to be used in the industrial environment under the name of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) concept, which is a sub-domain of IoT. The IIoT changes the way industrial processes are controlled and monitored, increasing operating efficiency. This article proposes a software architecture for IIoT that has a low degree of abstraction compared to the reference architectures presented in the literature. The architecture is organized on four-layer and it integrates the latest concepts related to fog and edge computing. These concepts are activated through the use of fog/edge/gateway nodes, where the processing of data acquired from things is performed and it is the place where things interact with each other in the virtual environment. The main contributions of this paper are the proposal and description of a complete IIoT software architecture, the use of a unified address space, and the use of the computing platform based on SoC (System on Chip) with specialized co-processors in order to be able to execute in real-time certain time-critical operations specific to the industrial environment.