Remote connections and new software licensing structures can create opportunities for incremental upgrades in control and automation software, advancing efficiency, improving information flow, and bringing greater optimization. The confluence of ubiquitous, open standard-based Internet connectivity and powerful, low-cost embedded devices has led to the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT).
A projected 25-billion IoT-connected devices are expected to be online by 2020. This trend disrupts the established control and instrumentation field, opening it up to a new range of possibilities referred to as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
The development of the Internet itself has been characterized by collaboration, interoperability, and conformance to open standards in contrast to the foundational ethos of the Internet. In a manner foreshadowed by proprietary mobile phone ecosystems, the IoT/IIoT space is emerging as a new "wild west" in which competing, closed silos have emerged. Each silo is vying to lock in a maximal share of the expected huge market by providing a full, closed, proprietary stack providing full vertical integration between the "things" in the field and the integrated cloud services that make them useful.
The IIoT trend toward fragmentation is at odds with the needs of system integrators and manufacturers in control, instrumentation, building management, and energy management fields. Over the past two decades, these fields have been characterized by industrywide collaboration in the creation of open standards that have exposed suppliers to more direct competition, while at the same time expanding their market reach. The result has created significant benefits to the industry as a whole. The convenience, added value, and efficiency of this approach is under threat from the new silos. In reaction to this danger, a number of vendors have formed the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) to work toward establishing a consensus around interoperability. To this end, the IIC has published the "Industrial Internet Reference Architecture Technical Report" (IIRA), which sets out an architectural framework intended to guide the development of Industrial Internet Systems (IIS). The IIRA explores architectural concerns from business, usage, functional, and implementation viewpoints. The implementation viewpoint discusses the technology and communication schemes required by the reference architecture and is of special interest for the topic at hand.
The IIRA outlines a number architecture patterns that largely depend on the presence of gateway devices, such as: