Realizing Seamless Integration of Sensors and Actuators into the IoT

Abstract

Ever since the inception of wireless sensor networks more than twenty years ago, we were promised networks consisting of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of nodes with sensors and/or actuators that would use self-X properties in order to form a functioning network by themselves. User interaction would not be necessary, or at least be absolutely minimalistic in all cases, including the later addition of more nodes. This promise has been ubiquitous regardless of network type, be it wireless sensor network, home automation, Internet of Things or Industrial Internet of Things.

Even though these self-X properties have long been promised, planning a deployment still offers a lot of obstacles to this day. One of these obstacles manifests in the form of a break in semantics when looking top to bottom at IoT/IIoT deployments. While process management level, operations management level and corporate management level are almost everywhere IT based, sensors and actuators are often still analog, which results in a mixture of systems in between.

In this paper, we describe the problems that arise when trying to close this semantic gap in detail, explain how taking the last mile in IIoT by enabling sensors and actuators with network capabilities removes these problems, and show additional benefits that stem from our solution. Moreover, we describe the inception of the periCORE, the first module which enables the integration of sensors and actuators into Single Pair Ethernet (SPE) worldwide.