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 Review of the Energy Efficient and Secure Multicast Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad hoc Networks

This paper presents a thorough survey of recent work addressing energy efficient multicast routing protocols and secure multicast routing protocols in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs). There are so many issues and solutions which witness the need of energy management and security in ad hoc wireless networks. The objective of a multicast routing protocol for MANETs is to support the propagation of data from a sender to all the receivers of a multicast group while trying to use the available bandwidth efficiently in the presence of frequent topology changes. Multicasting can improve the efficiency of the wireless link when sending multiple copies of messages by exploiting the inherent broadcast property of wireless transmission. Secure multicast routing plays a significant role in MANETs. However, offering energy efficient and secure multicast routing is a difficult and challenging task. In recent years, various multicast routing protocols have been proposed for MANETs. These protocols have distinguishing features and use different mechanismsComment: 15 page

Machine Learning in Wireless Sensor Networks: Algorithms, Strategies, and Applications

Wireless sensor networks monitor dynamic environments that change rapidly over time. This dynamic behavior is either caused by external factors or initiated by the system designers themselves. To adapt to such conditions, sensor networks often adopt machine learning techniques to eliminate the need for unnecessary redesign. Machine learning also inspires many practical solutions that maximize resource utilization and prolong the lifespan of the network. In this paper, we present an extensive literature review over the period 2002-2013 of machine learning methods that were used to address common issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The advantages and disadvantages of each proposed algorithm are evaluated against the corresponding problem. We also provide a comparative guide to aid WSN designers in developing suitable machine learning solutions for their specific application challenges.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Real-life performance of protocol combinations for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks today are used for many and diverse applications like nature monitoring, or process and wireless building automation. However, due to the limited access to large testbeds and the lack of benchmarking standards, the real-life evaluation of network protocols and their combinations remains mostly unaddressed in current literature. To shed further light upon this matter, this paper presents a thorough experimental performance analysis of six protocol combinations for TinyOS. During these protocol assessments, our research showed that the real-life performance often differs substantially from the expectations. Moreover, we found that combining protocols is far from trivial, as individual network protocols may perform very different in combination with other protocols. The results of our research emphasize the necessity of a flexible generic benchmarking framework, powerful enough to evaluate and compare network protocols and their combinations in different use cases

From carbon nanotubes and silicate layers to graphene platelets for polymer nanocomposites

In spite of extensive studies conducted on carbon nanotubes and silicate layers for their polymer-based nanocomposites, the rise of graphene now provides a more promising candidate due to its exceptionally high mechanical performance and electrical and thermal conductivities. The present study developed a facile approach to fabricate epoxy–graphene nanocomposites by thermally expanding a commercial product followed by ultrasonication and solution-compounding with epoxy, and investigated their morphologies, mechanical properties, electrical conductivity and thermal mechanical behaviour. Graphene platelets (GnPs) of 3.5

Supporting protocol-independent adaptive QoS in wireless sensor networks

Next-generation wireless sensor networks will be used for many diverse applications in time-varying network/environment conditions and on heterogeneous sensor nodes. Although Quality of Service (QoS) has been ignored for a long time in the research on wireless sensor networks, it becomes inevitably important when we want to deliver an adequate service with minimal efforts under challenging network conditions. Until now, there exist no general-purpose QoS architectures for wireless sensor networks and the main QoS efforts were done in terms of individual protocol optimizations. In this paper we present a novel layerless QoS architecture that supports protocol-independent QoS and that can adapt itself to time-varying application, network and node conditions. We have implemented this QoS architecture in TinyOS on TmoteSky sensor nodes and we have shown that the system is able to support protocol-independent QoS in a real life office environment

Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

[EN] Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are generally created for temporary scenarios. In such scenarios, where nodes are in mobility, efficient routing is a challenging task. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and cross-layer multipath routing protocol for such changing scenarios. Our routing mechanisms operate keeping in view the type of applications. For simple applications, the proposed protocol is inspired from traditional on-demand routing protocols by searching shortest routes from source to destination using default parameters. In case of multimedia applications, the proposed mechanism considers such routes which are capable of providing more data rates having less packet loss ratio. For those applications which need security, the proposed mechanism searches such routes which are more secure in nature as compared to others. Cross-layer methodology is used in proposed routing scheme so as to exchange different parameters across the protocol stack for better decision-making at network layer. Our approach is efficient and fault tolerant in a variety of scenarios that we simulated and tested.The authors would like to extend their sincere appreciation to the Deanship of Scientific Research at King Saud University for funding this research group no. 037-1435-RG.Iqbal, Z.; Khan, S.; Mehmood, A.; Lloret, J.; Alrajeh, NA. (2016). Adaptive Cross-Layer Multipath Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. Journal of Sensors. 2016:1-18. https://doi.org/10.1155/2016/5486437S1182016Abusalah, L., Khokhar, A., & Guizani, M. (2008). A survey of secure mobile Ad Hoc routing protocols. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 10(4), 78-93. doi:10.1109/surv.2008.080407Murthy, S., & Garcia-Luna-Aceves, J. J. (1996). An efficient routing protocol for wireless networks. Mobile Networks and Applications, 1(2), 183-197. doi:10.1007/bf01193336Toh, C.-K. (1997). Wireless Personal Communications, 4(2), 103-139. doi:10.1023/a:1008812928561Pearlman, M. R., & Haas, Z. J. (1999). Determining the optimal configuration for the zone routing protocol. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1395-1414. doi:10.1109/49.779922ZHEN, Y., WU, M., WU, D., ZHANG, Q., & XU, C. (2010). Toward path reliability by using adaptive multi-path routing mechanism for multimedia service in mobile Ad-hoc network. The Journal of China Universities of Posts and Telecommunications, 17(1), 93-100. doi:10.1016/s1005-8885(09)60431-3Sivakumar, R., Sinha, P., & Bharghavan, V. (1999). CEDAR: a core-extraction distributed ad hoc routing algorithm. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 17(8), 1454-1465. doi:10.1109/49.779926Zapata, M. G. (2002). Secure ad hoc on-demand distance vector routing. ACM SIGMOBILE Mobile Computing and Communications Review, 6(3), 106-107. doi:10.1145/581291.581312Khan, S., & Loo, J. (2010). Cross Layer Secure and Resource-Aware On-Demand Routing Protocol for Hybrid Wireless Mesh Networks. Wireless Personal Communications, 62(1), 201-214. doi:10.1007/s11277-010-0048-ySharma, V., & Alam, B. (2012). Unicaste Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks: A Survey. International Journal of Computer Applications, 51(14), 9-18. doi:10.5120/8108-1714Tarique, M., Tepe, K. E., Adibi, S., & Erfani, S. (2009). Survey of multipath routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks. Journal of Network and Computer Applications, 32(6), 1125-1143. doi:10.1016/j.jnca.2009.07.002Shiwen Mao, Shunan Lin, Yao Wang, Panwar, S. S., & Yihan Li. (2005). Multipath video transport over ad hoc networks. IEEE Wireless Communications, 12(4), 42-49. doi:10.1109/mwc.2005.1497857Li, Z., Chen, Q., Zhu, G., Choi, Y., & Sekiya, H. (2015). A Low Latency, Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 11(8), 946587. doi:10.1155/2015/946587Zheng, Z., Liu, A., Cai, L. X., Chen, Z., & Shen, X. (2016). Energy and memory efficient clone detection in wireless sensor networks. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, 15(5), 1130-1143. doi:10.1109/tmc.2015.2449847Dong, M., Ota, K., Liu, A., & Guo, M. (2016). Joint Optimization of Lifetime and Transport Delay under Reliability Constraint Wireless Sensor Networks. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 27(1), 225-236. doi:10.1109/tpds.2015.2388482Hamrioui, S., Lorenz, P., Lloret, J., & Lalam, M. (2013). A Cross Layer Solution for Better Interactions Between Routing and Transport Protocols in MANET. Journal of Computing and Information Technology, 21(3), 137. doi:10.2498/cit.1002136Sanchez-Iborra, R., & Cano, M.-D. (2014). An approach to a cross layer-based QoE improvement for MANET routing protocols. Network Protocols and Algorithms, 6(3), 18. doi:10.5296/npa.v6i3.5827Cho, J.-H., Swami, A., & Chen, I.-R. (2011). A Survey on Trust Management for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 13(4), 562-583. doi:10.1109/surv.2011.092110.0008