A Qualitative Evaluation of IPv6 for the Industrial Internet of Things.

IPv6 is the most promising protocol for complex and distributed network applications in the era of the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0. However, its industrial adoption, in particular in smart manufacturing systems, has been much slower than expected. Although the potential advantages of IPv6 for the industrial internet of things are well-known, it is not easily usable in practice. In this paper, we present a qualitative evaluation of IPv6 for the industrial internet of things. We have conducted expert interviews with five industrial IPv6 users. Our key results indicate that the major problems are threefold: First, tool support and existing libraries are incomplete or immature. Second, users still often have to manually configure the IP communication. Third, there are complicated one-fits-all protocols prevalent. We derive recommendations for further developments to advance and ease the use of IPv6 for smart manufacturing systems.