As industries are under pressure for shorter business and product lifecycles, there is an extensive effort from the research community for novel and profitable automation processes. This effort has given rise to the 5G Tactile Internet, which is characterized by extremely low latency communication in combination with high availability, reliability and security. In this paper, we discuss the key technologies to support the Tactile Internet characteristics in industrial environments and, then, we showcase the implementation of a novel 5G NFV-enabled experimental platform. Given that ultra-reliable low-latency communications is crucial for the manufacturing process, we demonstrate that, in our setup, sub-millisecond end-to-end communication is attainable, proving the suitability of our platform for tactile Internet industrial applications.

Smart grid is one of the main applications of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm. Within this context, this paper addresses the efficient energy consumption management of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in smart grids with variable energy price. To that end, first, we propose an energy scheduling method that minimizes the energy consumption cost for a particular time interval, taking into account the energy price and a set of comfort constraints, that is, a range of temperatures according to user's preferences for a given room. Then, we propose an energy scheduler where the user may select to relax the temperature constraints to save more energy. Moreover, thanks to the IoT paradigm, the user may interact remotely with the HVAC control system. In particular, the user may decide remotely the temperature of comfort, while the temperature and energy consumption information is sent through Internet and displayed at the end user's device. The proposed algorithms have been implemented in a real testbed, highlighting the potential gains that can be achieved in terms of both energy and cost.

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