Wireless Communications for Smart Manufacturing and Industrial IoT: Existing Technologies, 5G, and Beyond

Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in industrial environments. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communications protocols that they rely on. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless machine to machine communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research.