  The limited coexistence capabilities of current Internet-of-things (IoT)
wireless standards produce inefficient spectrum utilization and mutual
performance impairment. The entity of the issue escalates in industrial IoT
(IIoT) applications, which instead have stringent quality-of-service
requirements and exhibit very-low error tolerance. The constant growth of
wireless applications over unlicensed bands mandates then the adoption of
dynamic spectrum access techniques, which can greatly benefit from interference
mapping over multiple dimensions of the radio space. In this article, the
authors analyze the critical role of real-time interference detection and
classification mechanisms that rely on IIoT devices only, without the added
complexity of specialized hardware. The trade-offs between classification
performance and feasibility are analyzed in connection with the implementation
on low-complexity IIoT devices. Moreover, the authors explain how to use such
mechanisms for enabling IIoT networks to construct and maintain
multidimensional interference maps at run-time in an autonomous fashion.
Lastly, the authors give an overview of the opportunities and challenges of
using interference maps to enhance the performance of IIoT networks under
interference.
