1,231 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
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
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
- …