The Industrial Internet of Things as an enabler for a Circular Economy Hy-LP: A novel IIoT protocol, evaluated on a wind park's SDN/NFV-enabled 5G industrial network

Smart interconnected devices, including Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), permeate our lives and are now an integral part of our daily activities, paving the way towards the Internet of Things (IoT). In the industrial domain, these devices interact with their surroundings and system operators, while often also integrating industrial cloud applications. This 4th Industrial Revolution guides new initiatives, like the introduction of 5th Generation Mobile Networks (5G), to implement flexible, efficient, QoS- and energy- aware solutions that are capable of serving numerous heterogeneous devices, bringing closer the vision of a sustainable, Circular Economy. However, the lack of interoperable solutions that will accommodate the integration, use and management of the plethora of devices and the associated services, hinders the establishment of smart industrial environments across the various vertical domains. Motivated by the above, this paper proposes the Hy-LP - a novel hybrid protocol and development framework for Industrial IoT (IIoT) systems. Hy-LP enables the seamless communication of IIoT sensors and actuators, within and across domains, also facilitating the integration of the Industrial Cloud. The proposed solution is compared with existing standardised solutions on a common application, working around the protocols' intrinsic characteristics and features to produce each variant. The developed systems are evaluated on a common testbed, demonstrating that the proposed solution is around 10 times faster for the same CPU usage level, while consuming 7 times less memory. Moreover, the applicability of the proposed solutions is validated in the context of a real industrial setting, analyzing the network characteristics and performance requirements of an actual, operating wind park, as a representative use case of industrial networks.