If you’re designing systems, components, software, or any other facet of the Industrial Internet of Things (aka Industry 4.0), you know that failure is not an option. Even the slightest downtime could result in millions of dollars in unrecoupable losses, or worse yet, loss of life. At the same time, the “net” that your factory, hospital, or other industrial system MUST be rock-solid secure. In this session, we’ll look at the different facets of designing an Industrial platform, including the hardware, software, and everything in the middle, from pre-scope through to implementation, as well as networking/network security and reliability.
Schedule
The value proposition of the Industrial IoT is to maximize operational efficiency, minimize costs, and yield insights that can revolutionize manufacturing and organizational processes through the integration of automation technology and business intelligence systems. However, the investment of time, dollars and resources associated with such frameworks is not trivial. Identifying, planning and implementing an IIoT project takes a commitment by stakeholders at all levels and different functions.
In this IIoT University keynote, Maciej Kranz, Vice President of the Strategic Innovation at Cisco, and author of the New York Times Bestseller, “Building the Internet of Things,” will shed new light on best practices to start and scale your IoT journey. Drawing on two decades as an IoT pioneer, he will also provide practical guidelines required for any successful IIoT transformation, as well as “four quick paths” to quick ROI. From IT and OT technology integration and culture change to industrial case studies and ecosystem partners, the speaker will cover all the IIoT implementation bases, including the growing value of Fog Computing at the edge of operations. Consider this your blueprint for building a connected, digital factory.
Despite the newfound desire to add connectivity to devices ranging from automation controllers to light bulbs, industrial system designers are still governed by the laws of reliability and power consumption. Certainly, the benefits of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) architectures can only be realized if the systems that comprise them function as intended, requiring that any networking solution they use to provide ample security without doesn’t break the bank in terms of processor and memory resources. Here, standards are the most surefire way to get to market on time, within budget, and ensure long lifecycle deployments. However, most networking technologies migrating from the enterprise and consumer sectors fail to meet the performance and reliability requirements of IIoT systems.
Deployed for over a decade in the smart lighting and utility industries, the zigbee mesh networking protocol has enabled low latency, low data rate connectivity for small-, medium-, and large-scale networks, often in the context of ultra-low-power or energy harvesting devices. Now with added security tools and features, the zigbee alliance plans to expand on its footprint of hundreds of millions of installed devices through technologies tailored for the IIoT. Tobin Richardson, President and CEO of the zigbee alliance, explains.
For many Industrial Internet of Things applications, cellular has become the default wireless connection to remotely monitor sensor data, especially in locations that have not been economically feasible in the past. It is therefore critical that sensor OEMs and solution providers know and understand the LTE technology roadmaps: this includes when older 2G technology will go offline and what LTE technology is on the horizon. This discussion will give an overview of the LTE roadmap, a description of new technologies, and how they specifically address application challenges in the industrial sensor markets.
To build an industrial sensor-to-cloud proof of concept (PoC) that integrates your technology, you need to understand what components, protocols, interfaces, and security considerations are needed. Whether you supply precision sensors and actuators, or software analytics in cloud platforms, you will need some combination of hardware and software elements to build a real-world PoC. The challenge is in connecting the OT domain with IT/enterprise to represent relevant data that is usable for your business case. Many current gateways are focused only on IT data models or hardware that is tailored to enterprise systems, but do not consider low-level embedded systems with their memory constraints and latency requirements. This talk will focus on considerations to help kick-start your sensor-to-cloud concept by leveraging embedded technologies that simplify development and bridge the OT and IT enterprise.
For 802.15.4 and other low-power wireless communications infrastructures, 6LoWPAN offers the security and interoperability of IPv6 all the way to the edge node. Ed will discuss the benefits and tradeoffs involved in using 6LoWPAN and will outline the relative strengths (and weaknesses) of this protocol compared to other options. Ed will discuss the use cases and best practices for 6LoWPAN that have been developed during recent projects at SDS.
While data is the coin of our age, the vast majority of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices are governed by cost and power-consumption envelopes that disqualify most traditional networking technologies. Particularly in remote deployment scenarios consisting of sensor-based industrial “things” powered by batteries, cellular connectivity, for instance, carries too much overhead from both the business and design perspectives. This is especially true when considering that the data transmitted by such devices often doesn’t require the quality of service (QoS) inherent in modern communications networks; best-effort delivery and extremely low data rates typically suffice.
The LoRaWAN standard, a low-power, wide area network (LPWAN) protocol, provides a wide-area alternative to the complexity and overhead of current network implementations through sub-GHz, bi-directional communications that increase overall network capacity and exponentially reduce costs. As an open standard, the LoRaWAN protocol integrates security, supports geo-location services, and maintains simplicity–more than enough to get millions of sensor systems plugged into the IIoT value chain. Learn more from Vivek Mohan of Semtech and the LoRa Alliance in this Industrial IoT networking session.
With billions of nodes and many terabytes of data, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) holds much promise for helping us to work smarter and more efficiently. Unfortunately, all those nodes and data are potential security risks that can potentially bring much of the network down and wreak havoc. In the IIoT, we need to consider security as part of design and implementation. In this fast-paced overview class, we will take a look at where the major security issues exist in hardware, data, and network design and some of the ways we can minimize those risks.
The world is connected by networks, and those networks are critical to the operation of a broad range of devices and services in the industrial Internet. Preserving the integrity and security of equipment such as routers, switches, and firewalls used to create the network infrastructure is essential to network reliability, as well as maintaining integrity and privacy of the many kinds of data that transit networks. As increasingly sophisticated attacks are launched on network equipment, strong protection mechanisms for network equipment, both on the device and service level, is required.
This talk will look at how widely vetted trust concepts wil
...
