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The automated setup of Internet of things (IoT) systems in industrial environments is an open challenge at the forefront of networking and robotics domains. In this study, a robotic-aided deployment system is proposed and experimentally tested with reference to the Internet protocol version 6 technology. To this end, a design methodology has been conceived to attain the setup of a fully connected time-slotted channel hopping network in a target area, based on the measured received signal strength indication of wireless links, required spatial sensing resolution, and number of available IoT nodes. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, an experimental test bed has been set up, consisting of an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) that automatically deploys an IoT network in a laboratory environment. Experimental results clearly show that the UGV is able to deploy a fully connected 6TiSCH network that match spatial resolution requirements, highlighting how the proposed policy affects the position of IoT nodes release points.

Nowadays, Internet of things (IoT) and robotic systems are key drivers of technological innovation trends. Leveraging the advantages of both technologies, IoT-aided robotic systems can disclose a disruptive potential of opportunities The present contribution provides an experimental analysis of an IoT-aided robotic system for environmental monitoring. To this end, an experimental testbed has been developed. It is composed of: (i) an IoT device connected to (ii) an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) which executes a patrolling mission within a specified area, where (iii) an IoT network has been deployed to sense environmental data. An extensive experimental campaign has been carried out to scavenge pros and cons of adopted technologies. The key results of the authors analysis show that: (i) the UAV does not incur any significant overhead due to onboard IoT equipment and (ii) the overall quality of service expressed in terms of network joining time, data retrieval delay and packet loss ratio satisfies the mission requirements. These results enable further development in larger-scale environment.

Container networking is emerging as a game‐changer paradigm for the deployment of virtualized service infrastructures in a faster and reliable way. Nevertheless, small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are still skeptical to revise their business in this direction because of the absence of deep studies showing its effectiveness in real deployments leveraging local computing environments. To bridge this gap, this article presents a quantitative cross‐comparison of cutting‐edge technologies for container networking (including Docker as a container engine, Docker Swarm and Kubernetes as orchestrators, bare‐metal and OpenStack cloud as deployment platform), properly integrated to realize a virtualized service infrastructure within a commercial workstation. Initial experimental tests are conducted to identify the most suitable combination of technologies for high‐load environments, where many clients contact the virtualized service infrastructure to download files of large size. Obtained results demonstrate that the combination of Docker and Kubernetes generally ensures better performance on the bare‐metal deployment platform, thus emerging as mature and effective solutions to be used by SMEs. Finally, the behavior of the identified virtualized service infrastructure is also evaluated in a smart farm use case, where containers are in charge of processing images provided by mobile drones for monitoring purposes. In addition, in this case, the conducted study highlights the promising capability offered by container networking in real deployments, exploiting local computing environments. This article presents a quantitative cross‐comparison of cutting‐edge technologies for container networking. The study demonstrates the promising capability offered by this emerging paradigm in real deployments, exploiting local computing environments.