Towards Zero-Touch Network Provisioning for Embedded Industrial IoT: A Feasibility Study on Autonomous Guest Wi-Fi Access

As Industry 4.0 accelerates the deployment of autonomous embedded systems across diverse sectors, including healthcare, logistics, infrastructure, and energy, ensuring reliable and secure wireless connectivity remains a foundational challenge. Many operational environments rely on guest or public Wi-Fi networks protected by captive portals, which are inherently designed for human interaction. This presents a significant barrier for resource-constrained, headless embedded devices that must operate autonomously without user input. This paper investigates the feasibility of autonomous onboarding to such networks by analyzing the capabilities and limitations of embedded platforms, using the ESP32 microcontroller as a representative device. We develop a comprehensive taxonomy of prevalent guest Wi-Fi architectures, assess their compatibility with automated workflows, and evaluate the associated trade-offs in implementation complexity, resource consumption, latency, and cybersecurity risk. The findings reveal critical trade-offs between connectivity automation and security posture, emphasizing the need for machine-friendly networking standards like Passpoint and Opportunistic Wireless Encryption (OWE). This study provides a foundational framework for designing zero-touch, resilient connectivity mechanisms for embedded systems in a wide range of Industry 4.0 applications.