The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) practices holds great potential for the industry. Nonetheless, ensuring reliability and maintaining high-quality service is paramount

ABSTRACT : The adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) practices holds great potential for the industry. Nonetheless, ensuring reliability and maintaining high-quality service is paramount. Challenges, such as intermittent connectivity in wide-area wireless communications, can hinder the effective implementation of IoT principles within the industrial sector. Thus, this paper aims to introduce a novel system designed to actively oversee the status of wide-area wireless communication networks. The primary objectives are to enhance service quality and guarantee reliability. The new monitoring system has been successfully deployed on a telemetry system utilized by numerous industrial facilities in the Republic of South Africa. It has demonstrated the immediate detection of communication failures or anomalies while also achieving an impressive increase of over 25 percent in the average connection uplink time. Furthermore, this system has effectively monitored 80 remote end-points, each comprising more than one thousand individual industrial components.
INTRODUCTION : The rapid integration of the Internet into various aspects of daily life is opening up opportunities for the emergence of new research and development domains. Among these emerging fields, the Internet of Things (IoT) stands out as a promising and increasingly influential element in modern connectivity and communication. The concept of the 'Internet of Things' refers to a paradigm that revolves around leveraging existing technologies to create interconnected environments in which physical objects are linked to the Internet [1]. This extension of the Internet and the World Wide Web into the physical domain enables the transformation of ordinary objects into 'smart' entities. As these smart objects become more interconnected, they pave the way for the development of novel applications that can address existing challenges [2].
The industrial sector is witnessing rapid growth in the realm of IoT, with 'Industrial IoT' (IIoT) often being referred to as 'the fourth industrial revolution' or 'Industry 4.0' [3]. The term Industry 4.0 was coined by the World Economic Forum and introduced by the German government during the Hannover Trade Fair in 2011 [4]. Numerous industries are currently embracing IoT applications. However, heavy industries like mining and steel have been slower in their adoption of IoT applications. While smart metering and IoT have become commonplace in households and light industry, power stations responsible for generating power have been less proactive in incorporating similar technologies [5].
Expanding IoT applications into the industrial sector allows for the maintenance and optimization of interconnected systems and processes, potentially adding significant value to production output by enhancing efficiency. This is especially crucial due to the constraints imposed on heavy industries by external factors like government policies, economic fluctuations, and heightened competition [6]. Well-established heavy industries such as mining, steel production, water distribution, and power utilities have been hesitant in adopting IoT practices and applications [7]. Much of this reluctance to integrate IoT methods into existing processes stems from valid concerns such as safety, security, and expenses [7].
Currently, most of the heavy industry sector cannot be classified as 'smart' industries, as they continue to operate at a traditional 'best-effort' service level [8]. Heavy industrial facilities are often spread across wide geographical areas, as seen in water pumping schemes, and operate under challenging conditions, such as mines. Nevertheless, it remains feasible to usher this sector into the IoT realm using existing technologies. Technologies like radio-frequency identification (RFID), wide-area wireless communications such as the global system for mobile communication (GSM) network (including long-term evolution (LTE) networks), and the global positioning system (GPS) can be employed to transform existing industrial processes and operations into 'smart heavy industries.'
System interoperability is recognized as a pivotal aspect of any industrial IoT ecosystem [9]. The quality of service (QoS) levels in wireless communication systems is of paramount importance for sustaining the performance and effectiveness of an interoperable system [9]. Ensuring the reliability and availability of wireless communication services, such as the GSM network, is crucial to enabling industrial IoT applications to reach their full potential. Gazis [9] highlights various initiatives related to machine-to-machine communication that have been introduced to enhance wireless quality of service. Most of these initiatives, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), focus on maintaining a global standard for communication protocols to ensure global alignment in machine-to-machine (M2M) communication.
Studies indicate that the performance of mobile communication networks can be adversely affected by resource-intensive IoT applications [10], [11]. Large-scale industrial IoT applications may also encounter cellular access limitations due to extremely high levels of network traffic. Several models and methods have been proposed to mitigate access limitations, including network access overload control, network access overhead reduction, and network access deadlines [12]. Limitations in wireless networks directly impact the adoption of IoT principles in the heavy industry sector [13]. Consequently, there must be a strong emphasis on ensuring guaranteed quality of service to enable industries to benefit from IoT applications.
Implementing IoT solutions in the heavy industry sector can also enhance safety and sustainability [14]. This enables the development of modular stand-alone systems applicable to a wide range of net-centric applications where standards like LTE and third or even fourth generation (3G and 4G) wireless communications play a predominant role in wireless data transfer [15].
Expanding the IoT field into the heavy industry sector can result in increased equipment uptime, reduced maintenance costs, and optimized overall equipment and control efficiency [16]. By integrating communication across these operations, efficiencies can be achieved by taking a holistic view of all operations and processes [17].
The provided information discusses the challenges and importance of addressing Quality of Service (QoS) issues in industrial IoT applications, along with the proposal of a new system to monitor and improve wide-area wireless telemetry. Here's a reformulated version of the same information with some rephrasing: It is evident that numerous industrial IoT applications can be categorized as mission-critical systems. Nevertheless, the existing challenges within the IoT landscape can obstruct the performance of 'smart' systems. These challenges commonly encompass restricted bandwidth, sporadic connectivity in wireless networks, and potential security vulnerabilities [18]. These obstacles significantly impact the Quality of Service (QoS), which is a pivotal element in industrial IoT applications [19]. Inadequate communication can effectively negate the benefits of an IoT application. Consequently, the repercussions could be severe if an application's connectivity falters. In the realm of industrial IoT applications, communication breakdowns can result in infrastructure damage, and in extreme scenarios, even pose threats to human life [20].
To integrate heavyweight industrial players into the IoT domain, it is imperative to address the current QoS issues that render IoT applications unviable for these sectors. The communication network and its foundational infrastructure are recognized as the constraining factors for industrial IoT applications. Given the remote locations and configurations of certain industrial sites, wide-area wireless communications are often the predominant mode for data transmission. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel system designed to actively monitor the essential network layer parameters of wide-area wireless telemetry systems, deployable for industrial IoT applications. Integrating this system with existing industrial IoT infrastructure is expected to mitigate the risks and challenges currently faced. The proposed system comprises a cloud-based software application with the capability to oversee various parameters of deployed routers, including signal strength, data usage, and connection uplink. We will provide an overview of the system's design and methodology, followed by the presentation of system results after conducting a case study and a critical analysis of these results in Section 4. Section 5 will explore potential avenues for future work, and finally, we will conclude this paper in Section 6, with Section 2 focusing on the current IoT architecture and its limitations for industrial applications, and Section 3 presenting our design overview and methodology.