Guest Editorial: Advanced Industrial Communication Systems: A Sneak Peak to the Ecosystem of Next Generation Industrial Communications

Advanced industrial communication systems are fundamental pillars of the ongoing digital transformation of industrial systems. Initiatives like the Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet Consortium aim at increasing the overall production efficiency leveraging on fast, reliable, and deterministic communication technologies. The improvements of information and communication technologies (ICT), driven by the tremendous influence of the consumer market, result in positive relapse for the industrial ICT, allowing an ever-increasing amount of data and information to be gathered from systems, machines, and devices. On the other hand, the availability of low-cost computational capabilities permitted to easily process these “Big Data,” generating on-the-fly trend forecasts for the management systems, which, in turn, allow to issue actions for controlling the manufacturing processes in real time. The ensemble of all these technologies is generally addressed with the term industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).