1st Workshop on Enhanced Network Techniques and Technologies for the Industrial IoT to Cloud Continuum (IIoT-Nets)

Call for Papers

All types of industries, such as production, shipping, agriculture, manufacturing verticals, and utilities such as railways, energy grids, and self-driving or remote driving infrastructure, have identified opportunities in automating process control applications and the monitoring of remote operations. The promising growth in connected equipment and machines (Industrial IoT) underscores the importance and the need for remote process control systems and remote monitoring operations. The use of cloud technologies improves the coordination of the control processes and the applications. To support this we need enhanced network techniques and technologies, plus architectures and frameworks for this Industrial IoT to Cloud continuum, providing the foundation for a fast expanding Operations and Process Control applications.

Emerging Operational Technology traffic profiles require the capabilities of wide-area, large-scale deterministic, and time-sensitive networks. These traffic patterns emerging from the monitoring operations and the process control applications requires enhanced networks with specialized techniques, technologies, and attributes that are both non-interfering and non-disruptive. These networks are reliable and present deterministic behaviours for seamless machine-to-machine communication, compared to general-purpose networks which are commonly for human-to-software interaction. The outcomes and outputs of these control applications are so critically dependent on having high-quality network performance that most industry operators have yet to venture into controlling devices beyond a local site.

While there is a clear requirement to use cloud native technologies, there are many technical problems to solve to enable distributed process control and monitoring functions over the cloud. We plan to feature research and other activities to bridge gaps between the cloud operators, industrial network operators, and network service providers, and to overcome the issues of transitioning from fully local operation to cloud. This raises a number of interesting questions:

Related to the forwarding aspects: how to describe a command structure in a process control so that network forwards it gracefully; how cloud-native process control services will be deployed and generalized given that the traffic profiles vary for each controller and field-device pair; how to leverage and incorporate virtualized infrastructure with deterministic networks and multi-tenant support.
How management views evolve for cloud-centric processes: how to define, monitor, observe, discover, and respond to faults in the system and control of machines and field devices; how does cloud-to-edge-to-field device connectivity get managed.

Finally, such networks are not operated by network experts, instead, industrial process engineers or application developers would need to deal with deployment and maintenance of such networks, and would need to express their network requirements in a programmable and standard manner. Thus, auto-provisioning and interactions across the different infrastructures should be considered.

The goal of the workshop is to feature recent research and initiatives related to (a) architectures and frameworks for the Industrial IoT to Cloud continuum, (b) providing the foundation for Operations and Process Control applications and emerging traffic profiles, and (c) industrial network operations, with all things related to remote field-device communication using enhanced network techniques and technologies. The contributors are encouraged to bring forth novel use- cases, presenting their work which solves and highlights challenges in industrial process control automation, and which helps build a research and user community to explore and bridge the gaps between industrial and network operators.

The “Enhanced network techniques and technologies for the Industrial IoT to Cloud continuum” workshop aims at bringing cloud, network operators, and industrial network experts together with the intention of synthesizing a unified architectural view on how to evolve from closed industrial systems to cloud-native. This workshop also solicits work on use-cases, design principles, techniques, implementations, and experience insights that address the workshop objectives.

Topics of Interest

Architectures and frameworks for the Industrial IoT to Cloud continuum
Application interface to networks that support industrial processes
Challenges in supporting virtualized controller over WAN/cloud
Cloud based and virtualized Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC)
Real-time cloud-based process control challenges and solutions
Cloud-oriented multi-site connectivity for process automation
Network challenges in supporting industrial digital twins. Coordination between physical infrastructures and application specific digital twins
Programmable data-plane techniques for remote operations and control
Security, reliability and safety in open industrial networks
Distributed Monitoring and Telemetry techniques
Cloud-converged feedback control loops
Use of decentralization such as Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) for improving trust

Submission Instructions

Submissions must be original, unpublished work, and not under consideration at another conference or journal. Submitted papers must be at most six (6) pages long, excluding references and appendices, in two-column 10pt ACM format. Papers must include author names and affiliations for single-blind peer reviewing by the PC. Authors of accepted submissions are expected to present and discuss their work at the workshop.

Please submit your paper using HotCRP site: https://iiot-nets23.hotcrp.com.

If you have any questions or problems with your submission, please get in touch with Kiran Makhijani (kiranm@futurewei.com).