The integration of the Internet of Things (IOT) into industry to create an industrial IOT provides the potential for increased automation and efficiency and forms an important foundation for Industry 4.0.

Networks of sensors and actuators that are able to gather and process data efficiently offer an enormous potential to a wide range of industries and functions, from manufacturing to healthcare. A common way to organize such systems is through a traditional Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), where a series of networked devices relay information back to a centralized cloud through a common gateway. Although these systems go some way to promoting the implementation of IOT in industry, industrial systems need to be scalable, efficient and robust with life-cycles that are typically much longer than those of consumer systems. Typically, as more devices are incorporated into device-to-cloud systems latency, network traffic and power consumption increase - meaning losses in efficiency and robustness.

In a recently published paper Cristina Paniagua, Jens Eliasson and Jerker Delsing of Luleå University of Technology, propose a method a method for efficient device-to-device service invocation based on the orchestration capabilities of the Arrowhead framework, showing the advantages for the industrial IOT compared with these more traditional device-to-cloud systems. The paper demonstrates the advantages of a system of resource constrained devices communicating directly, device-to-device showing significant improvements in latency compared with a device-to-cloud solution. The paper highlights how the Arrowhead orchestration system could be applied to increase performance and robustness in the industrial IOT by making efficient use of fog computing and systems of resource constrained devices. 

The full article is available here:
http://ltu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1372254/FULLTEXT01.pdf

You can read more about Cristina Paniagua and her work here:
https://www.ltu.se/staff/c/cripan-1.167417