781 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 Simple Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Network Path Selection
Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual
antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless
environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed
space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future
investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel
scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the
order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best
relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for
cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a
distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology
information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel
conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the
relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on
the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate
performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided.
Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme
achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex
protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is
required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique,
allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption
could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G
wireless systems.Comment: To appear, IEEE JSAC, special issue on 4
Cooperative Retransmissions Through Collisions
Interference in wireless networks is one of the key capacity-limiting
factors. Recently developed interference-embracing techniques show promising
performance on turning collisions into useful transmissions. However, the
interference-embracing techniques are hard to apply in practical applications
due to their strict requirements. In this paper, we consider utilising the
interference-embracing techniques in a common scenario of two interfering
sender-receiver pairs. By employing opportunistic listening and analog network
coding (ANC), we show that compared to traditional ARQ retransmission, a higher
retransmission throughput can be achieved by allowing two interfering senders
to cooperatively retransmit selected lost packets at the same time. This
simultaneous retransmission is facilitated by a simple handshaking procedure
without introducing additional overhead. Simulation results demonstrate the
superior performance of the proposed cooperative retransmission.Comment: IEEE ICC 2011, Kyoto, Japan. 5 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. Analog
Network Coding, Retransmission, Access Point, WLAN, interference, collision,
capacity, packet los
A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends
This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the
inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense
mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the
security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity,
confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive
overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in
view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats
are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing
security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless
network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term
evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in
physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open
communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer.
We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their
counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive
jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the
integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and
cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some
technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are
summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201
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