Cyber-physical Systems

9Enabling Information and Communication Technologies

We are now at the beginning of the third part of this book, which will focus on more concrete aspects of cyber‐physical systems (CPSs) guided by the theoretical concepts presented so far; this will include data transmission and processing technologies, CPS applications, and their potential social impacts. The focus of this chapter is on the key information and communication technologies (ICTs) that afford the existence of CPSs. Instead of describing in detail the devices, protocols, algorithms, and standards, which would be hardly possible, our choice is to critically review three prominent ICT domains, namely data networks (and the Internet), advanced statistical methods for data processing, and new data storage paradigms. Specifically, we will provide an overview of the key features of the fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks and machine‐type wireless communications, the strengths and limitations of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), and the advantages and drawbacks of distributed ledgers like blockchains and distributed computing like federated learning. Besides those trends, a speculation of the future of ICT will be presented considering the implications of quantum computing and the Internet of Bio‐Nano Things (IoBNT).

9.1 Introduction

The technological development related to ICTs can be dated back to the years after World War II, in a specific conjuncture of the Cold War and Fordism [1]. In the ...