Wireless Cloud Network for Augmented Communication and Sensing in 5G Massive Industrial IoT

Driven by the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), future and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies will be required to support unprecedented services and demanding applications for massively dense machine-type connectivity, low latency, high reliability and distributed information processing. In this article, we describe a novel approach to IoT architectures based on a wireless cloud network (WCN) platform that can lease advanced communication and sensing services to off-the-shelf industrial wireless devices via a dense, self-organizing cloud of wireless nodes. The paper introduces, at first, the proposed architecture and illustrates an experimental case study inside a pilot industrial plant evaluating the proposed architecture performance based on cooperative communication. Then, it gives an overview of consensus-based distributed signal and information processing algorithms. Finally, human body localization and radio vision applications based on distributed processing of wireless signals are investigated to support future and emerging human-machine interaction modes.