Industrial communication systems represent one of the most important innovations of the last decades in the context of factory and process automation systems. They are networks specifically designed to cope with the tight requirements of these challenging application fields such as real time, determinism, and reliability. Moreover, industrial networks are often deployed in environments characterized by strong electromagnetic interference, mechanical stress, critical temperature, and humidity. Over the last three decades, different classes of industrial networks have been developed according to changing requirements and available communication and information technologies. In this paper, we first provide an account of the state of the art, reviewing classical fieldbuses, real-time Ethernet networks, and industrial wireless networks, along with their most relevant features, applications, and performance figures. We introduce the complex standardization framework and analyze the market status and assumptions for future development. In the second part, we address the future perspectives focusing on new technologies, standards, and fields of application. In particular, we consider the time-sensitive networking (TSN) family of standards, Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems, high-performance wireless LANs, industrial applications of cellular networks, and Ethernet networks for automotive communication.

In this article, some considerations are presented about the way several well-known industrial networks (based on both fieldbus and industrial Ethernet solutions) can be practically extended with wireless subnetworks that rely on popular technologies, such as IEEE 802.11 and 802.15.4. This results in hybrid networks, which are able to combine the advantages of both wired and wireless solutions. In particular, advantages and drawbacks of several interconnection techniques are highlighted and, depending on the wired networks specifically taken into account, some hybrid configurations that are able to cope in a satisfactory way with the tight timing requirements often imposed by industrial control systems are suggested.

Low‐Power Wide‐Area Networks (LPWANs) have recently emerged as appealing communication systems in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). Particularly, they proved effective in typical IoT applications such as environmental monitoring and smart metering. Such networks, however, have a great potential also in the industrial scenario and, hence, in the context of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), which represents a dramatically growing field of application. In this paper we focus on a specific LPWAN, namely, LoRaWAN, and provide an assessment of its performance for typical IIoT employments such as those represented by indoor industrial monitoring applications. In detail, after a general description of LoRaWAN, we discuss how to set some of its parameters in order to achieve the best performance in the considered industrial scenario. Subsequently we present the outcomes of a performance assessment, based on realistic simulations, aimed at evaluating the behavior of LoRaWAN for industrial monitoring applications. Moreover, the paper proposes a comparison with the IEEE 802.15.4 network protocol, which is often adopted in similar application contexts. The obtained results confirm that LoRaWAN can be considered as a strongly viable opportunity, since it is able to provide high reliability and timeliness, while ensuring very low energy consumption.

The groundbreaking transformations triggered by the Industry 4.0 paradigm have dramatically reshaped the requirements for control and communication systems within the factory systems of the future. The aforementioned technological revolution strongly affects industrial smart and distributed measurement systems as well, pointing to ever more integrated and intelligent equipment devoted to derive accurate measurements. Moreover, as factory automation uses ever wider and complex smart distributed measurement systems, the well-known Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm finds its viability also in the industrial context, namely Industrial IoT (IIoT). In this context, communication networks and protocols play a key role, directly impacting on the measurement accuracy, causality, reliability and safety. The requirements coming both from Industry 4.0 and the IIoT, such as the coexistence of time-sensitive and best effort traffic, the need for enhanced horizontal and vertical integration, and interoperability between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT), fostered the development of enhanced communication subsystems. Indeed, established technologies, such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi, widespread in the consumer and office fields, are intrinsically non-deterministic and unable to support critical traffic. In the last years, the IEEE 802.1 Working Group defined an extensive set of standards, comprehensively known as Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), aiming at reshaping the Ethernet standard to support for time-, mission- and safety-critical traffic. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the TSN Working Group standardization activity is provided, while contextualizing TSN within the complex existing industrial technological panorama, particularly focusing on industrial distributed measurement systems. In particular, this paper has to be considered a technical review of the most important features of TSN, while underlining its applicability to the measurement field. Furthermore, the adoption of TSN within the Wi-Fi technology is addressed in the last part of the survey, since wireless communication represents an appealing opportunity in the industrial measurement context. In this respect, a test case is presented, to point out the need for wirelessly connected sensors networks. In particular, by reviewing some literature contributions it has been possible to show how wireless technologies offer the flexibility necessary to support advanced mobile IIoT applications.

The effects of interference in the setup of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) represent a critical issue, and as such, it needs to be carefully addressed. To this aim, helpful information can be achieved through measurements to be carried out in advance on suitable prototypes and testbeds. In this paper, the measurement of industrial WSN performance is dealt with. In particular, a suitable testbed enlisting IEEE 802.15.4 wireless sensor nodes is presented along with the results of some experiments carried out even in the presence of interference. The purpose is to show how to evaluate some specific parameters of a WSN employed for industrial applications to obtain useful information for its setup optimization in the presence of interference. The analysis will show that from the measurement of these parameters (number of failed pollings, polling round-trip time, experimental cycle time, and alarm latency), interference effects can effectively be recognized, and the network setup can be optimized.

In the last few years, wireless networks have gained significant importance in the context of industrial communication systems [1], where their deployment is bringing several noticeable benefits, ranging from replacement of cables to the connection of devices that cannot be reached by traditional wired systems. These features make the adoption of wireless networks for industrial applications very attractive, and they are envisaged to be deployed even more in the future, either as stand-alone systems or arranged in hybrid (wired/wireless) configurations. Unfortunately, wireless communication systems are often characterized by well-known problems, such as fading, multipath propagation, shadowing, and interference, that have the undesired effect of increasing the bit error rate (BER), resulting in the introduction of delays as well as randomness in packet delivery. Moreover, in the context of industrial communication, these aspects may be exacerbated by the specific nature of the environment. Indeed, the rapid movement of machineries along with the possible presence of electromagnetic interference sources, which are typical of manufacturing sites, may introduce considerable fluctuations of the BER values that contribute to further degradation in communication quality.