A review of industrial wireless networks in the context of Industry 4.0

There have been many recent advances in wireless communication technologies, particularly in the area of wireless sensor networks, which have undergone rapid development and been successfully applied in the consumer electronics market. Therefore, wireless networks (WNs) have been attracting more attention from academic communities and other domains. From an industrial perspective, WNs present many advantages including flexibility, low cost, easy deployment and so on. Therefore, WNs can play a vital role in the Industry 4.0 framework, and can be used for smart factories and intelligent manufacturing systems. In this paper, we present an overview of industrial WNs (IWNs), discuss IWN features and related techniques, and then provide a new architecture based on quality of service and quality of data for IWNs. We also propose some applications for IWNs and IWN standards. Then, we will use a case from our previous achievements to explain how to design an IWN under Industry 4.0. Finally, we highlight some of the design challenges and open issues that still need to be addressed to make IWNs truly ubiquitous for a wide range of applications.