Edge Computational Offloading for Corrosion Inspection in Industry 4.0

The fifth generation (5G) mobile networks are a game changer for the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). The difficulty of developing vertical applications for mobile networks is however still challenging. This article proposes a new paradigm solution to significantly facilitate deploying network applications (NetApp) closer to the end user and improving the user experience, facilitated by 5G. This new paradigm leverages flexible service onboarding and composition end to end, and computation offloading to a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) platform to meet the demanding requirements of the NetApps. A functional prototype is developed and empirical comparison is conducted to validate and evaluate the performance of a corrosion detection NetApp using artificial intelligence (AI) in three different scenarios where the application is hosted. The prototype runs this NetApp over an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) connected to a 5G network testbed, and the results offer insights into this performance improvement and elaborates how opting for this NetApp solution can help the industry. In this case, the use of this NetApp can achieve a 55.47 percent reduction in computation time and improve corrosion identification processing time by 25.5 percent.