This article provides an overview of the development and standardizations of connectivity solutions for enabling the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). It also highlights key IIoT connectivity technologies and platforms that have the potential of driving the next industrial revolution. In addition, the article addresses the main challenges standing in the way of realizing the full potential of the IIoT, namely attaining secure connectivity and managing a vastly fragmented ecosystem of connectivity solutions and platforms. Finally, IIoT connectivity challenges are illustrated by the example of future building automation.

The tremendous advancement of Internet-of-things (IoT) has proliferated the interaction between the physical and cyber worlds. Consumer electronics, as the first tier in the physical world, would play a crucial role to enable ubiquitous information exchange. The adoption of IoT technologies will inevitably enhance the maturity of consumer products and services, proliferating the market of consumer electronics. Nonetheless, the ever-growing number of uncoordinated connections and unregulated integrations of technologies would pose various challenges and threats, resulting in vulnerability to consumer electronics. Thus, there is an urgent need for defining the trusted infrastructure and research directions for consumer electronics. In this paper, the next-generation (next-gen) consumer electronics would be defined for the first time. Also, the state-of-the-art architecture of next-gen consumer electronics would be presented, in compliance with the emerging IoT standard IEEE 2668. To address the underlying challenges in next-gen consumer electronics, this paper will classify the essential research topics for consumer electronics and present future research opportunities, such as the exploitation of complex network analysis, cybersecurity measures, etc., to foster the development of consumer electronics in a reliable, efficient, safe, and secure manner.

Network automation has been bred by the deployment of 5G based Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) in Industry 4.0, and further approaching pervasive AI and human-robot-interaction/-collaboration toward 6G based Industry 5.0. Hitherto, to the best of the authors knowledge, research efforts are still required to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art network automation technologies for IIoT in 5G based Industry 4.0 and summary of challenges for next-generation network automation regarding the stricter network requirements of 6G based Industry 5.0. Therefore, in this article, we conduct a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art network automation technologies, standardizations, and corresponding impact on IIoT of Industry 4.0. We also forecast the next-generation network automation development toward 6G based Industry 5.0. This article provides blueprint of the next-generation network automation, meanwhile conducting comprehensive overview of the SoA network automation technologies in Industry 4.0, which gains high referable value for the researchers in the relative domain.

Digital twin (DT) has emerged as a promising technology for improving resource allocation decisions in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks. In this paper, we consider an IoV network where mobile edge computing (MEC) servers are deployed at the roadside units (RSUs). The IoV network provides ubiquitous connections even in areas uncovered by RSUs with the assistance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which can act as a relay between RSUs and task vehicles. A virtual representation of the IoV network is established in the aerial network as DT which captures the dynamics of the entities of the physical network in real-time in order to perform efficient resource allocation for delay-intolerant tasks. We investigate an intelligent delay-sensitive task offloading scheme for the dynamic vehicular environment which provides computation resources via local execution, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), and vehicle-to-roadside-unit (V2I) offloading modes based on the energy consumption of the system. Moreover, we also propose a multi-network deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-based resource allocation algorithm (RADiT) in the DT-assisted network for maximizing the utility of the IoV network while optimizing the task offloading strategy. Further, we compare the performance of the proposed algorithm with and without the presence of V2V computation mode. RADiT is further evaluated by comparing it with another benchmark DRL algorithm called soft actor-critic (SAC) and a non-DRL approach called greedy. Finally, simulations are performed to demonstrate that the utility of the proposed RADiT algorithm is higher under every condition compared to its respective conditions in SAC and greedy approach. Consequently, the proposed framework jointly improves energy efficiency and reduces the overall delay of the network. The proposed algorithm with UAV relay further increases the efficiency of the network by increasing the task completion rate.

Approximately a decade after their introduction, industrial wireless technologies are on the rise. Recognizing this need, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) began working on a best practices operational guide, the Practical Guide to Industrial Wireless Systems Deployment. This guide is currently under development in the NIST Industrial Wireless Systems Technical Working Group (IWSTWG), in collaboration with the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Standards Technical Committee (TC) and the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurements Society (IMS) TC-9 committee. This article covers contributions made by IES Standards TC members to the wireless practices and applications relevant for industrial wireless systems in the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) encompassing noncritical and critical use cases.