The Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications in industrial settings are set to bring in the fourth industrial revolution. The industrial environment consisting of high profile manufacturing plants and a variety of equipment is inherently characterized by high reflectiveness, causing significant multi-path components that affect the propagation of wireless communications—a challenge among others that needs to be resolved. This paper provides a detailed insight into Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) within the context of indoor industrial environments. It presents the applications of NB-IoT for industrial settings, such as the challenges associated with these applications. Furthermore, future research directions were put forth in the areas of NB-IoT network management using self-organizing network (SON) technology, edge computing for scalability enhancement, security in NB-IoT generated data, and proposing a suitable propagation model for reliable wireless communications.

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Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is one of the drivers of industry 4.0 and the study of its wireless behavior in Indoor industrial environments has become important. This is because of the unfavorable conditions poised to wireless propagation as a result of the presence of heavy-duty equipment and the physical structure of industrial buildings. In this paper, an indoor industry was modeled to present some of the reflective characteristics and its effects on wireless propagation, particularly large-scale fading. The results obtained which include propagation paths, path loss, and impulse response showed how the environment affected the wireless transmission of NB-IoT. However, to mitigate this challenge, a collaborative scheme is introduced to improve the transmission among the affected NB-IoT terminals. The proposed scheme resulted in a collective improvement in path loss value by 30.44%.

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A study of the behavior of NB-IoT wireless communication in an industrial indoor environment was conducted in this paper. With Wireless Insite software, a scenario in the industrial sector was simulated and modeled. Our research examined how this scenario or environment affected the communication parameters of NB-IoT’s physical layer. In this context, throughput levels among terminals as well as between terminals and transceiver towers, the power received at signal destination points, signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) in the environment, and distances between terminals and transceivers are considered. These simulated results are also compared with the calculated or theoretical values of these parameters. The results show the effect of the industrial setting on wireless communication. The differences between the theoretical and simulated values are also established.