Industrial environments have evolved to accommodate a new degree of service decentralisation and digitisation that aim to improve business and processing efficiency. At the centre of this change is the application of internet of things (IoT) devices, which assist in the automation and monitoring of different aspects of manufacturing services, such as the temperature and conditions of materials, the timing of specific robotic actions, etc.

Industrial IoT (IIoT), therefore, relates to interconnected systems that achieve a new degree of digitisation and leverage new business models, improving efficiency, sustainability, and overall scalability. The increasing use of IIoT in manufacturing benefits from wireless communications, as wireless and cellular technologies provide advantages such as support for the faster onboarding of multiple devices, lower setup and operational costs, and the possibility to explore new services based on mobile robots.

However, industrial applications require deterministic guarantees in the form of a minimum and maximum bounded latency, low jitter, and zero packet loss. To support these requirements, wireless and cellular technologies need to be fine-tuned to provide deterministic guarantees, as already seen in the most recent developments of 5G new radio, Wi-Fi 6/6E, and Wi-Fi 7.

This Special Issue aims to archive the most recent developments in wireless networking for IIoT. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Flexible 5G/6G network architectures for IIoT environments.
Wireless and cellular IIoT use-cases design, development, and performance evaluation.
Networking protocol performance measurement for IIoT scenarios.
Networking protocol interoperability discussion and evaluation.
The SDN management of industrial wireless/cellular communications.
AI/ML-based network monitoring and measurement for the support of heterogeneous 5G/Wi-Fi end-to-end communications.
Wireless-based time synchronization across heterogeneous wireless/cellular infrastructures.
Novel scheduling approaches for multipoint environments, supporting time-sensitive networking (TSN) requirements.