An Innovative Prefabricated Microsystem for Industrial IoT: Addressing Remote Onboarding and OS Provisioning Challenges for Edge Nodes

Chinese industrial IoT devices frequently encounter challenges during the cloud-based remote onboarding and OS provisioning: BIOS system of many industrial IoT devices does not support the HTTPS Boot protocol, which limits its ability to securely receive configuration information and increases security risks. Although there are alternative options such as PXE boot or manual configuration, both have security risks. For this reason, this paper has designed an innovative prefabricated micro-system with agent mechanism that enables Edge Nodes to securely access the cloud servers for management and control. Specifically, once the operator installs the uOS image on the Edge Node for initial deployment, bidirectional secure communication is established between the agent and the cloud server, enabling the Edge Node to successfully complete onboarding. Subsequently, the agent retrieves the latest configuration data from the cloud server to finalize provisioning. The pre-fabricated microsystem also supports fault recovery and process monitoring. Furthermore, this study conducts performance and maximum concurrency tests under both mTLS and TLS + JWT protocols. The innovative agent solution proposed herein will provide robust technical support and enhanced security guarantees for China’s Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).