An Outlook of Narrowband IoT for Industry 4.0

Internet of things (IoT) is a pervasive technology and now it has applications in every technology sector. A new industrial revolution has been started through the connected technologies enabled by the IoT. It is commonly known as Industry 4.0. This is certainly very much different from the previous versions of the industrial revolutions. In fact, IoT will provide a connected framework for large scale manufacturing and production which is going to be very efficient, fast, cost effective, and free from the traditional manufacturing faults. In Industry 4.0 a large number of sensors will be deployed to provide a transparent picture of the whole process. The main goal of Industry 4.0 is to make the manufacturing and production autonomous. Therefore, it is predicted that the majority of the large scale production processes will use IoT to become autonomous. However, Industry 4.0 has also a lot of scopes for the small and medium scale industries. Large scale deployment of IoTs has to be energy efficient and sustainable in the long term. Narrowband IoT (NBIoT) is a right choice in this direction. This paper provides the main issues and challenges of NBIoT for Industry 4.0.