Smart Transducers and Network Infrastructures for Industry 4.0

Smart transducers and network infrastructures are pillars of the IoT. Transducers play a fundamental role in providing measurements to monitoring and control chains in industry. Industry 4.0 specifications require that measurement information be always available for the application layer whatever be the source and the physical channel. IEEE 1451 is a family of standards edited with the aim of introducing the plug and play approach in the field of distributed measurement systems and wireless sensor networks. At first, a brief summary of the IEEE 1451 introduces fundamental concepts like Transducer Interface Data Sheet (TEDS), Network Capable Application Processor (NCAP) and Transducer Interface Module (TIM). Then, a sight to the IEEE 21451.001 allows a novel approach to edge computing to be described. Finally, some examples of application of this new approach to typical digital signal processing problems are reported in the paper.