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

Multihop Diversity in Wideband OFDM Systems: The Impact of Spatial Reuse and Frequency Selectivity

The goal of this paper is to establish which practical routing schemes for wireless networks are most suitable for wideband systems in the power-limited regime, which is, for example, a practically relevant mode of operation for the analysis of ultrawideband (UWB) mesh networks. For this purpose, we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) in a wideband linear multihop network in which transmissions employ orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and are affected by quasi-static, frequency-selective fading. Considering open-loop (fixed-rate) and closed-loop (rate-adaptive) multihop relaying techniques, we characterize the impact of routing with spatial reuse on the statistical properties of the end-to-end conditional mutual information (conditioned on the specific values of the channel fading parameters and therefore treated as a random variable) and on the energy and spectral efficiency measures of the wideband regime. Our analysis particularly deals with the convergence of these end-to-end performance measures in the case of large number of hops, i.e., the phenomenon first observed in \cite{Oyman06b} and named as ``multihop diversity''. Our results demonstrate the realizability of the multihop diversity advantages in the case of routing with spatial reuse for wideband OFDM systems under wireless channel effects such as path-loss and quasi-static frequency-selective multipath fading.Comment: 6 pages, to be published in Proc. 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications (IEEE ISSSTA'08), Bologna, Ital

A Case for Time Slotted Channel Hopping for ICN in the IoT

Recent proposals to simplify the operation of the IoT include the use of Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigms. While this is promising, several challenges remain. In this paper, our core contributions (a) leverage ICN communication patterns to dynamically optimize the use of TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), a wireless link layer technology increasingly popular in the IoT, and (b) make IoT-style routing adaptive to names, resources, and traffic patterns throughout the network--both without cross-layering. Through a series of experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB interconnecting typical IoT hardware, we find that our approach is fully robust against wireless interference, and almost halves the energy consumed for transmission when compared to CSMA. Most importantly, our adaptive scheduling prevents the time-slotted MAC layer from sacrificing throughput and delay

Adaptive OFDM Index Modulation for Two-Hop Relay-Assisted Networks

In this paper, we propose an adaptive orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) index modulation (IM) scheme for two-hop relay networks. In contrast to the traditional OFDM IM scheme with a deterministic and fixed mapping scheme, in this proposed adaptive OFDM IM scheme, the mapping schemes between a bit stream and indices of active subcarriers for the first and second hops are adaptively selected by a certain criterion. As a result, the active subcarriers for the same bit stream in the first and second hops can be varied in order to combat slow frequency-selective fading. In this way, the system reliability can be enhanced. Additionally, considering the fact that a relay device is normally a simple node, which may not always be able to perform mapping scheme selection due to limited processing capability, we also propose an alternative adaptive methodology in which the mapping scheme selection is only performed at the source and the relay will simply utilize the selected mapping scheme without changing it. The analyses of average outage probability, network capacity and symbol error rate (SER) are given in closed form for decode-and-forward (DF) relaying networks and are substantiated by numerical results generated by Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 30 page