A new fog-enabled wireless sensor network architecture for industrial internet of things applications

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained considerable popularity in industrial applications and are widely used nowadays in several industrial monitoring and control systems. To process and store the huge amount of data WSNs generate, most of the solutions opt for the Cloud approach as it provides suitable capabilities to deal with 'Big Data' scenarios. However, as discussed in this paper, Cloud-based solutions have several drawbacks, e.g. latency and security, to name just a few. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a system meant for monitoring of industrial assets based on the Fog computing paradigm. As shown in this paper, the proposed solution provides better performance in terms of reliability/accuracy and allows full control over the sensor nodes. The system provides also the ability to rapidly program the Fog nodes and update their business logic. Finally, the advantages of the proposed Fog-based solution are discussed considering a real-world industrial application scenario.