A Survey on AI-Empowered Softwarized Industrial IoT Networks

The future generation of mobile networks envision Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) as key enabling technologies that will foster the emergence of sophisticated use cases, with the industrial sector being one to benefit the most. This survey reviews related works in this field, with a particular focus on the specific role of network softwarization. Furthermore, the survey delves into their context and trends, categorizing works into several types and comparing them based on their contribution to the advancement of the state of the art. Since our analysis yields a lack of integrated practical implementations and a potential desynchronization with current standards, we finalize our study with a summary of challenges and future research ideas.