Load Balancing for Reliable Self-Organizing Industrial IoT Networks

Industry 4.0 will interconnect and digitalize traditional industries to enable smart and adaptable factories that efficiently utilize resources and integrate systems. A key enabler of this paradigm is the communications infrastructure that will support the ubiquitous connectivity of cyber-physical production systems. The integration of wireless networks will facilitate the dynamic reconfiguration of the factories of the future, and the collection and management of large amounts of data. This vision requires reliable and low latency wireless links with the necessary bandwidth to support data intensive applications and spatio-temporal variations of data resulting from the reconfiguration of Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) systems. To this aim, this paper proposes a load balancing scheme that dynamically manages the wireless links based on their quality and the amount of data to be transmitted by each node. The proposed scheme avoids the saturation of channels, and significantly augments the reliability of industrial wireless networks in comparison with existing solutions.