A Software Architecture for the Industrial Internet of Things—A Conceptual Model

The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging concept that has revolutionized the use of new technologies in everyday life. The economic impact of IoT becoming very important, and it began to be used in the industrial environment under the name of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) concept, which is a sub-domain of IoT. The IIoT changes the way industrial processes are controlled and monitored, increasing operating efficiency. This article proposes a software architecture for IIoT that has a low degree of abstraction compared to the reference architectures presented in the literature. The architecture is organized on four-layer and it integrates the latest concepts related to fog and edge computing. These concepts are activated through the use of fog/edge/gateway nodes, where the processing of data acquired from things is performed and it is the place where things interact with each other in the virtual environment. The main contributions of this paper are the proposal and description of a complete IIoT software architecture, the use of a unified address space, and the use of the computing platform based on SoC (System on Chip) with specialized co-processors in order to be able to execute in real-time certain time-critical operations specific to the industrial environment.