Consumo de energía y calidad de servicio en redes WBAN : Una evaluación de desempeño entre capa cruzada e IEEE802.15.4

RESUMEN: Dentro de los esquemas de comunicación de redes inalámbricas de área corporal (WBAN), se encuentran los protocolos de capa cruzada, constituidos en una novedosa opción para alcanzar un balance efectivo entre consumo eficiente de energía y métricas de desempeño. En el presente trabajo, evaluamos el desempeño de una estrategia de capa cruzada al compararla contra los protocolos del estándar IEEE802.15.4 en una WBAN. Se evaluó el desempeño de ambas estrategias empleando una simulación de redes WBAN. Luego se ejecutó una comparación estadística y se encontró que la estrategia de capa cruzada ofrece un mejor desempeño con respecto a la compensación entre consumo eficiente de energía y algunas métricas de desempeño en nuestra WBAN. Observamos que en general, la estrategia de capa cruzada supera a ambos modos del estándar IEEE802.15.4 (ranurado y no-ranurado) con respecto a consumo eficiente de energía, retraso extremo a extremo, tasa de pérdida de paquetes y goodput.ABSTARCT: Different communication schemes for Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN) pretend to achieve a fair tradeoff between efficient energy consumption and the accomplishment of performance metrics. Among those schemes are the Cross-layer protocols that constitute a good choice to achieve the aforementioned tradeoff by introducing novel protocol techniques which are away from the traditional communications model. In this work we assessed the performance of a WBAN cross-layer protocol stack by comparing it against the performance of the protocols of the IEEE802.15.4 standard, which is commonly used for WBAN deployment nowadays. We evaluated the performance of both, cross-layer and IEEE802.15.4 approaches, by means of a simulation, by using a popular network simulator and its frameworks for wireless networks. And then performed a statistical comparison and ascertained that the cross-layer protocol stack offers better performance regarding a tradeoff between efficient energy consumption and performance metrics in our particular test scenario. We observed that, in general, the cross-layer approach outperformed both modes of IEEE802.15.4 standard (slotted and unslotted) regarding energy consumption, end to end delay, packet loss rate and goodput. The results of our experiments reported that the cross-layer strategy saves up to 80% more energy than IEEE802.15.4 unslotted and it is only a 5% below the slotted mode. Regarding the quality of service metrics the performance was always better when using the cross-layer scheme

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