4,206 research outputs found
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
A Dynamic Multimedia User-Weight Classification Scheme for IEEE_802.11 WLANs
In this paper we expose a dynamic traffic-classification scheme to support
multimedia applications such as voice and broadband video transmissions over
IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Obviously, over a Wi-Fi link
and to better serve these applications - which normally have strict bounded
transmission delay or minimum link rate requirement - a service differentiation
technique can be applied to the media traffic transmitted by the same mobile
node using the well-known 802.11e Enhanced Distributed Channel Access (EDCA)
protocol. However, the given EDCA mode does not offer user differentiation,
which can be viewed as a deficiency in multi-access wireless networks.
Accordingly, we propose a new inter-node priority access scheme for IEEE
802.11e networks which is compatible with the EDCA scheme. The proposed scheme
joins a dynamic user-weight to each mobile station depending on its outgoing
data, and therefore deploys inter-node priority for the channel access to
complement the existing EDCA inter-frame priority. This provides efficient
quality of service control across multiple users within the same coverage area
of an access point. We provide performance evaluations to compare the proposed
access model with the basic EDCA 802.11 MAC protocol mode to elucidate the
quality improvement achieved for multimedia communication over 802.11 WLANs.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, 3 tables, International Journal of Computer
Networks & Communications (IJCNC
Self-Stabilizing TDMA Algorithms for Dynamic Wireless Ad-hoc Networks
In dynamic wireless ad-hoc networks (DynWANs), autonomous computing devices
set up a network for the communication needs of the moment. These networks
require the implementation of a medium access control (MAC) layer. We consider
MAC protocols for DynWANs that need to be autonomous and robust as well as have
high bandwidth utilization, high predictability degree of bandwidth allocation,
and low communication delay in the presence of frequent topological changes to
the communication network. Recent studies have shown that existing
implementations cannot guarantee the necessary satisfaction of these timing
requirements. We propose a self-stabilizing MAC algorithm for DynWANs that
guarantees a short convergence period, and by that, it can facilitate the
satisfaction of severe timing requirements, such as the above. Besides the
contribution in the algorithmic front of research, we expect that our proposal
can enable quicker adoption by practitioners and faster deployment of DynWANs
that are subject changes in the network topology
Study on QoS support in 802.11e-based multi-hop vehicular wireless ad hoc networks
Multimedia communications over vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) will play an important role in the future intelligent transport system (ITS). QoS support for VANET therefore becomes an essential problem. In this paper, we first study the QoS performance in multi-hop VANET by using the standard IEEE 802.11e EDCA MAC and our proposed triple-constraint QoS routing protocol, Delay-Reliability-Hop (DeReHQ). In particular, we evaluate the DeReHQ protocol together with EDCA in highway and urban areas. Simulation results show that end-to-end delay performance can sometimes be achieved when both 802.11e EDCA and DeReHQ extended AODV are used. However, further studies on cross-layer optimization for QoS support in multi-hop environment are required
A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks
In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs
A Study of Medium Access Control Protocols for Wireless Body Area Networks
The seamless integration of low-power, miniaturised, invasive/non-invasive
lightweight sensor nodes have contributed to the development of a proactive and
unobtrusive Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN). A WBAN provides long-term health
monitoring of a patient without any constraint on his/her normal dailylife
activities. This monitoring requires low-power operation of
invasive/non-invasive sensor nodes. In other words, a power-efficient Medium
Access Control (MAC) protocol is required to satisfy the stringent WBAN
requirements including low-power consumption. In this paper, we first outline
the WBAN requirements that are important for the design of a low-power MAC
protocol. Then we study low-power MAC protocols proposed/investigated for WBAN
with emphasis on their strengths and weaknesses. We also review different
power-efficient mechanisms for WBAN. In addition, useful suggestions are given
to help the MAC designers to develop a low-power MAC protocol that will satisfy
the stringent WBAN requirements.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, 7 table
Adaptive EDCF: Enhanced service differentiation for IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks
This paper describes an adaptive service differentiation scheme for QoS enhancement in IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc networks. Our approach, called adaptive enhanced distributed coordination function (AEDCF), is derived from the new EDCF introduced in the upcoming IEEE 802.11e standard. Our scheme aims to share the transmission channel efficiently. Relative priorities are provisioned by adjusting the size of the contention window (CW) of each traffic class taking into account both applications requirements and network conditions. We evaluate through simulations the performance of AEDCF and compare it with the EDCF scheme proposed in the 802.11e. Results show that AEDCF outperforms the basic EDCF, especially at high traffic load conditions. Indeed, our scheme increases the medium utilization ratio and reduces for more than 50% the collision rate. While achieving delay differentiation, the overall goodput obtained is up to 25% higher than EDCF. Moreover, the complexity of AEDCF remains similar to the EDCF scheme, enabling the design of cheap implementations
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