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 ZIGBEE TECHNOLOGY

The zigbee communication is a communication technology to connect local wireless nodes and provides high stability and transfer rate due to data communication with low power. In the nodes away from coordinator in one PAN, the signal strength is weak causing the network a shortage of low performance and inefficient use of resources due to transferring delay and increasing delay time and thus cannot conduct seamless communication. This study suggests the grouping method, that makes it possible to perform wide range data transferring depending on the node signal strength in zigbee node and analyzes the suggested algorithm through simulation. Based on IEEE 802.15.4 Low Rate-Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) standard, the Zigbee standard has been proposed to interconnect simple, low rate and battery powered wireless devices. The de-ployment of Zigbee networks is expected to facilitate numerous applications such as Home-appliance net-works, home healthcare, medical monitoring and environmental sensors. An effective routing scheme is more important for Zigbee mesh networks. In order to achieve effective routing in Zigbee Mesh networks, a Zigbee protocol module is realized using NS-2. The suitable routing for different data services in the Zigbee application layer and a best routing strategy for Zigbee mesh network are proposed. The ZigBee standard provides network, security, and application support services operating on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 Medium AccessControl (MAC) and Physical Layer wireless standard. It employs a group of technologies to enable scalable, self-organizing, self-healing networks that can manage various data traffic patterns. ZigBee is a low-cost, low-power, wireless mesh networking standard. The low costal lows the technologyto be widely deployed in wireless control and monitoring applications, the low power-usage allows longerlife with smaller batteries, and the mesh networking which promises high reliability and larger range. ZigBee has-been developed to meet the growing demand for capable wireless networking between numerous low power devices. The aims of this network are to reduce the energy consumption and latency by enhancing routing algorithm. In a traditional tree routing when a node wants to transmit a packet to the destination, the packet has to follow child/parent relationship and go along tree topology, even if the destination is lying at nearby source. In order to solve this problem, an Enhanced Tree Routing Algorithm is introduced using ZigBee network. This algorithm can find the shortest path by computing the routing cost for all of router that stored in neighbor table, and transmit the packet to the neighbor router that can reduce the hop count of transmission. The enhanced tree routing algorithm can achieve more stable and better efficiency then the previous traditional tree routing algorithm