A Flexible and Reliable Internet-of-Things Solution for Real-Time Production Tracking With High Performance and Secure Communication

The concept of Industrial Revolution 4.0 (IR4.0) has attracted a lot of attention from academia and industry in recent years. Many existing manufacturers are forced to relook into their exiting production processes, exploring modern ways to improve the yields. Unfortunately, this is difficult to achieve when the data is limited. The situation is particularly serious for many SMEs in developing countries, wherein the manufacturing machines are not up-to-date and lack computational and connectivity capabilities. As an initiative to tackle this issue, we present an end-to-end Internet-of-Things (IoT) solution in this paper, aiming at tracking the production performance of old manufacturing machines reliably. This paper goes over the designs and reasoning behind the proposed solution. We also demonstrated that with careful optimization, high-performance secure encryption key encapsulation and decapsulation are achievable, which is critical for secure communication in IoT systems. As of the time of writing, our IoT system had been deployed in a real manufacturing environment and had been running continuously for approximately 365 days without data loss over the wide area network (WAN).