# I3 Mote: An Open Development Platform for the Intelligent Industrial Internet
## 1 Introduction  
Nowadays, with the advent of the Industry 4.0, the need for a new generation of monitoring and automation devices has emerged. These devices must cope with the connectivity, complex data processing requirements and energy constraints of novel scenarios, whilst meeting, at the same time, stringent operative costs and industrial-level reliability. Most of the current industrial devices (e.g., a pump controller or a power meter) are custom-made by manufacturers that integrate different components in a tailored system. Their prototypes are built using different development kits and, when the functionality has been validated, a final product is developed based on the integrated prototypes. This last step is usually time-consuming and costly. The platform-based design approach can provide a solution to meet conflicting design requirements, such as performance, flexibility, design time and cost. The idea of platform-based design applied to embedded systems is not, of course, new [1, 2]. Today, a commonly accepted definition for platform-based design is \"an integration-oriented design approach emphasizing systematic reuse, for developing complex products based upon platforms and compatible hardware and software virtual components, intended to reduce development risks, costs and time-to-market\" [3]. This approach has been key, for example, to the vertiginous development and indisputable success of smartphones in recent years. To support this approach, it is necessary to previously establish the concept of platform. In application-driven design, the term platform is defined as \"a set of subsystems and interfaces developed to form a common structure from which a stream of derivative products can be efficiently developed and produced\" [4]. In the definition of platform underlies the concept of \"least commonmultiple\", a commonality among all products of the family. Therefore, the design of a new platform starts from the definition of a set of overall specifications, not for the product itself, but for the application domain. State-of-the-art automation devices integrate sensing, computing and connectivity capabilities, lately adopting wireless communications. In addition, these devices operate powered by batteries and ideally scavenge energy from the environment to ensure long operational time and hence low maintenance costs. All these elements must form part of the new generation of industrial platforms. Next we outline some of this features:  
1. Wireless communication standards and technologies emerged in industrial process monitoring and automation applications. These standards provided high levels of reliability and low power operation, enabling novel use cases and an important operative cost reduction due to their deployment and maintenance simplicity. 2. Most industrial processes now being automated require access to different sensors. Moreover, new applications combine the information coming from different types of sensors and use the fused information to perceive the environment more accurately [5]. This trend, called sensor fusion or, more generally, data fusion, results in better and safer decisions when compared to independent systems. Data fusion incurs a computing overhead due to a higher algorithm complexity, which therefore demands higher performance processors. 3. The low-power requirement has evolved from being a desirable feature to an essential one. Traditionally, the low power consumption has been associated to battery-powered applications, since battery replacement is impractical, often costly and sometimes just impossible. Nowadays low consumption is also a necessity in the industry, even in applications where no battery is required, due to the increasing number of regulations that electronic equipment must meet. 4. Industrial inter-connectivity, which requires physical attachment to existing equipment.