9,215 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
Cross-layer design of multi-hop wireless networks
MULTI -hop wireless networks are usually defined as a collection of nodes
equipped with radio transmitters, which not only have the capability to
communicate each other in a multi-hop fashion, but also to route each others’ data
packets. The distributed nature of such networks makes them suitable for a variety of
applications where there are no assumed reliable central entities, or controllers, and
may significantly improve the scalability issues of conventional single-hop wireless
networks.
This Ph.D. dissertation mainly investigates two aspects of the research issues
related to the efficient multi-hop wireless networks design, namely: (a) network
protocols and (b) network management, both in cross-layer design paradigms to
ensure the notion of service quality, such as quality of service (QoS) in wireless mesh
networks (WMNs) for backhaul applications and quality of information (QoI) in
wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for sensing tasks. Throughout the presentation of
this Ph.D. dissertation, different network settings are used as illustrative examples,
however the proposed algorithms, methodologies, protocols, and models are not
restricted in the considered networks, but rather have wide applicability.
First, this dissertation proposes a cross-layer design framework integrating
a distributed proportional-fair scheduler and a QoS routing algorithm, while using
WMNs as an illustrative example. The proposed approach has significant performance
gain compared with other network protocols. Second, this dissertation proposes
a generic admission control methodology for any packet network, wired and
wireless, by modeling the network as a black box, and using a generic mathematical
0. Abstract 3
function and Taylor expansion to capture the admission impact. Third, this dissertation
further enhances the previous designs by proposing a negotiation process,
to bridge the applications’ service quality demands and the resource management,
while using WSNs as an illustrative example. This approach allows the negotiation
among different service classes and WSN resource allocations to reach the optimal
operational status. Finally, the guarantees of the service quality are extended to
the environment of multiple, disconnected, mobile subnetworks, where the question
of how to maintain communications using dynamically controlled, unmanned data
ferries is investigated
Towards Optimal Distributed Node Scheduling in a Multihop Wireless Network through Local Voting
In a multihop wireless network, it is crucial but challenging to schedule
transmissions in an efficient and fair manner. In this paper, a novel
distributed node scheduling algorithm, called Local Voting, is proposed. This
algorithm tries to semi-equalize the load (defined as the ratio of the queue
length over the number of allocated slots) through slot reallocation based on
local information exchange. The algorithm stems from the finding that the
shortest delivery time or delay is obtained when the load is semi-equalized
throughout the network. In addition, we prove that, with Local Voting, the
network system converges asymptotically towards the optimal scheduling.
Moreover, through extensive simulations, the performance of Local Voting is
further investigated in comparison with several representative scheduling
algorithms from the literature. Simulation results show that the proposed
algorithm achieves better performance than the other distributed algorithms in
terms of average delay, maximum delay, and fairness. Despite being distributed,
the performance of Local Voting is also found to be very close to a centralized
algorithm that is deemed to have the optimal performance
Flow Allocation for Maximum Throughput and Bounded Delay on Multiple Disjoint Paths for Random Access Wireless Multihop Networks
In this paper, we consider random access, wireless, multi-hop networks, with
multi-packet reception capabilities, where multiple flows are forwarded to the
gateways through node disjoint paths. We explore the issue of allocating flow
on multiple paths, exhibiting both intra- and inter-path interference, in order
to maximize average aggregate flow throughput (AAT) and also provide bounded
packet delay. A distributed flow allocation scheme is proposed where allocation
of flow on paths is formulated as an optimization problem. Through an
illustrative topology it is shown that the corresponding problem is non-convex.
Furthermore, a simple, but accurate model is employed for the average aggregate
throughput achieved by all flows, that captures both intra- and inter-path
interference through the SINR model. The proposed scheme is evaluated through
Ns2 simulations of several random wireless scenarios. Simulation results reveal
that, the model employed, accurately captures the AAT observed in the simulated
scenarios, even when the assumption of saturated queues is removed. Simulation
results also show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher AAT,
for the vast majority of the wireless scenarios explored, than the following
flow allocation schemes: one that assigns flows on paths on a round-robin
fashion, one that optimally utilizes the best path only, and another one that
assigns the maximum possible flow on each path. Finally, a variant of the
proposed scheme is explored, where interference for each link is approximated
by considering its dominant interfering nodes only.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog
PACE: Simple Multi-hop Scheduling for Single-radio 802.11-based Stub Wireless Mesh Networks
IEEE 802.11-based Stub Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are a cost-effective and flexible solution to extend wired network infrastructures. Yet, they suffer from two major problems: inefficiency and unfairness. A number of approaches have been proposed to tackle these problems, but they are too restrictive, highly complex, or require time synchronization and modifications to the IEEE 802.11 MAC.
PACE is a simple multi-hop scheduling mechanism for Stub WMNs overlaid on the IEEE 802.11 MAC that jointly addresses the inefficiency and unfairness problems. It limits transmissions to a single mesh node at each time and ensures that each node has the opportunity to transmit a packet in each network-wide transmission round. Simulation results demonstrate that PACE can achieve optimal network capacity utilization and greatly outperforms state of the art CSMA/CA-based solutions as far as goodput, delay, and fairness are concerned
Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges
With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing
number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed
and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected.
Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime
satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency
and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base
stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks
using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services.
Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs.
Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient
maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated
electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS
sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications,
conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be
tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the
demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key
technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage,
and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an
environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to
be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and
atmosphere conditions, are also discussed
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