Edge Computing Architecture for IIoT: Store-and-Forward, Batch Processing, and Bandwidth Optimization [2026]
Here's an uncomfortable truth about industrial IoT: your cloud platform is only as reliable as the worst cellular connection on your factory floor.
And in manufacturing environments — where concrete walls, metal enclosures, and electrical noise are the norm — that connection can drop for minutes, hours, or days. If your edge architecture doesn't account for this, you're not building an IIoT system. You're building a fair-weather dashboard that goes dark exactly when you need it most.
This guide covers the architecture patterns that separate production-grade edge gateways from science projects: store-and-forward buffering, intelligent batch processing, binary serialization, and the MQTT reliability patterns that actually work when deployed on a $200 industrial router with 256MB of RAM.