A Survey of Network Automation for Industrial Internet-of-Things Towards Industry 5.0

Network automation has been bred by the deployment of 5G based Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) in Industry 4.0, and further approaching pervasive AI and human-robot-interaction/-collaboration towards 6G based Industry 5.0. Hitherto, to the best of the authors knowledge, research efforts are still required to provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art network automation technologies for IIoT in 5G-based Industry 4.0 and summary of challenges for next-generation network automation regarding the stricter network requirements of 6G based Industry 5.0. Therefore, in this article, we conduct a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art network automation technologies, standardizations, and corresponding impact on IIoT of Industry 4.0. We also forecast the next-generation network automation development towards 6G-based Industry 5.0. This article provides blueprint of the next-generation network automation, meanwhile conducting comprehensive overview of the SoA network automation technologies in Industry 4.0, which gains high referable value for the researchers in the relative domain.