Key features of Industrial IoT

Understanding some of the capacities required to meet industrial use cases.

Here are some of the Key features that make Industrial IoT platform suitable for Industrial applications, Machine 2 Machine communication, Edge Appliances and automation use cases.

Industrial Sensors / Devices - IoT technology gets its distinction with the use of sensors / devices. It is the heart of IoT system. Industrial use cases requires more stable and solid sensors for continuous reading and self-calibrations. Typically, they are called as online and inline sensors. Due to the nature of longevity of these types of sensors, they are expensive. These sensors and IoT technology transform a standard passive network to an active system that assimilates to work well within the industrial environment.

Connectivity – Industrial IoT requires connectivity speed to send and receive data seamlessly. The modern wireless technologies such as 4G/5G, LoRAWAN, NB-IoT, e-SIM enables IoT networking and connectivity easier and faster; additionally, remote IoT requirements need longer battery life to keep the sensor active, traditional wireless technologies like Wifi and Bluetooth requires high battery power to operate; Industrial IoT leverages newer wireless technologies to keep the remote devices operating for longer period. Also, LPWAN (Low Power WAN) communication is private in nature as a result, it becomes cost-effective.

Data Streaming and Analytics - IoT can transform anything into ‘smart’. In order to make the things and machines smarter, a deeper analytical thinking and processing is required. Industrial IoT platform should include high speed data streaming and processing engine at edge level to apply analytical thinking capabilities to make the system or machine smart. Traditional IoT deployments are historic metric generation in nature but IIoT requires advanced Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to support complex industrial use cases.

Integration - In addition to data sensing, collection, data normalization and metrics; the same should be reachable to business users. However, business users are primarily working on the business systems, therefore taking these IoT data intelligence to the business system is a more comfortable way to present to the business users. Application integration is a much needed feature in the IIoT Platform to publish intelligence data to the business applications. Every IIoT Platform should have various application integration or connectors to send data to enterprise application.

Automation - In addition to data collection, IIoT differentiates itself from traditional IoT platform by providing automation capabilities. Automation are modern ways to reduce manual and human intensive efforts to control the operational processes. IIoT Platform featured with automation capabilities helps trigger automated processes (ex: turn on the motor pump remotely when water level is low) based on the sensor data. Automation can be achieved by sending instructions to the machinery or smart things to act on it. Technically Uplink and Downlink are approaches followed for communication between smart things and cloud platform.

Industrial IoT combines all of these features and many more to deliver comprehensive solutions to its Industrial problems.