IIoT Application Architecture and Design

In the previous chapter, we covered the core components and many of the business cases, of IIoT. We will continue the journey and dive deep into IoT application architecture and develop our first end-to-end IoT application utilizing the knowledge we have gained.

In this chapter, we will cover some of the key aspects of IIoT application development:

• The challenges of developing IIoT applications
• IIoT system architecture
• Deep diving into edge and cloud application development
• The core concepts of using a sample end-to-end IIoT application

IIoT applications – an introduction

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is designed to harness the power of IIoT and cloud in health care, manufacturing, and industrial environments to monitor performance, optimize operations, and solve problems remotely, all using IIoT applications. The focus of IIoT applications is on connecting equipment such as turbines, jet engines, and locomotives, to the cloud and to each other, in meaningful ways. As such, IIoT application design has many similarities with typical IoT application design in addressing concerns such as edge connectivity, massive data, high-speed data ingestion, and security. But there are some unique challenges, such as knowledge of asset models, industrial analytics, and industrial operations, when you create applications for industrial customers.

...

IIoT system architecture

IIoT system architecture, in its simplistic view, consists of three tiers (as the following diagram illustrates):

• Tier 1: Devices
• Tier 2: The Edge Gateway
• Tier 3: The cloud

Three-tier architecture of a typical IIoT end-to-end application

Tier 1 of the IIoT architecture consists of networked components, typically sensors and actuators, from the IIoT equipment, which use protocols such as Modbus, Zigbee, or proprietary protocols, to connect to an Edge Gateway. Tier 2 includes sensor data aggregation systems called Edge Gateways that provide functionality, such as preprocessing of the data, securing connectivity to cloud, and using systems such as WebSockets, the event hub, and, even in some cases, edge analytics or fog computing. Tier 3 includes the cloud application built for IIoT using the microservices architecture, which is usually polyglot and inherently...

The anatomy of our first IIoT application

We will design our first IIoT application end-to-end architecture using a very lightweight Edge Gateway that checks for any deviation in the temperature data using basic threshold analytics. When the threshold is breached, an alert is sent to the alert service in the cloud for storage and further processing of the alerts:

High level end-to-end architecture of the sample IIoT application with an Edge Gateway which has a basic analytic which sends alerts to the cloud

We will use a node server to design the analytics and use WebSocket as the cloud connectivity. We will connect to the cloud application using Spring Boot with PostgreSQL as the data store. Analytics will be a very simple descriptive analytics deployed in the Edge Gateway that is threshold-based which generates the alerts in the Cloud. The architecture of the sample application...

IIoT/IoT platforms overview

Now that we have seen the basic components of IIoT application architecture let us look at a few options to choose before building our IIoT solutions. Building a IIoT application from the ground up is possible and requires a large amount of setup, computer power and storage. For a typical IIoT application we need to set up various different programming language environments, database options, analytics frameworks, such as Spark or Storm, data ingestion pipelines and so on. It is possible to build the entire setup from the ground up, but we can also potentially use a robust IIoT platform if it meets our needs.

Utilizing a good IIoT platform will provide you with the needed infrastructure and guidelines to successfully build and launch your IIoT applications, and also it will shorten your go to market timeline. IIoT platforms free up the developer&apos...

Summary

In this chapter the high-level architecture of IIoT applications. Furthermore, we developed our own sample application to illustrate the richness and depth of the IIoT application ecosystem. To summarize: IIoT consists of three key components namely device, the gateway, and the cloud. Devices, with their sensor, gets connected to gateway, which aggregates the data from sensors and typically applies some basic analytics. Gateways, using secure protocols such as MQTT or HTTPS/WebSockets, connect to the Cloud, which stores the data for further processing.

In addition, we covered in depth the details of each of the tiers, including a good overview of PaaS and a sample PaaS platform, Cloud Foundry, and the development model using microservices in cloud. We also covered a sample application covering all of the three tiers. Finally, we ended this chapter with an overview of a...