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

Resource Allocation in Ad Hoc Networks

Unlike the centralized network, the ad hoc network does not have any central administrations and energy is constrained, e.g. battery, so the resource allocation plays a very important role in efficiently managing the limited energy in ad hoc networks. This thesis focuses on the resource allocation in ad hoc networks and aims to develop novel techniques that will improve the network performance from different network layers, such as the physical layer, Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and network layer. This thesis examines the energy utilization in High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) systems at the physical layer. Two resource allocation techniques, known as channel adaptive HSDPA and two-group HSDPA, are developed to improve the performance of an ad hoc radio system through reducing the residual energy, which in turn, should improve the data rate in HSDPA systems. The channel adaptive HSDPA removes the constraint on the number of channels used for transmissions. The two-group allocation minimizes the residual energy in HSDPA systems and therefore enhances the physical data rates in transmissions due to adaptive modulations. These proposed approaches provide better data rate than rates achieved with the current HSDPA type of algorithm. By considering both physical transmission power and data rates for defining the cost function of the routing scheme, an energy-aware routing scheme is proposed in order to find the routing path with the least energy consumption. By focusing on the routing paths with low energy consumption, computational complexity is significantly reduced. The data rate enhancement achieved by two-group resource allocation further reduces the required amount of energy per bit for each path. With a novel load balancing technique, the information bits can be allocated to each path in such that a way the overall amount of energy consumed is minimized. After loading bits to multiple routing paths, an end-to-end delay minimization solution along a routing path is developed through studying MAC distributed coordination function (DCF) service time. Furthermore, the overhead effect and the related throughput reduction are studied. In order to enhance the network throughput at the MAC layer, two MAC DCF-based adaptive payload allocation approaches are developed through introducing Lagrange optimization and studying equal data transmission period

A Joint PHY/MAC Architecture for Low-Radiated Power TH-UWB Wireless Ad-Hoc Networks

Due to environmental concerns and strict constraints on interference imposed on other networks, the radiated power of emerging pervasive wireless networks needs to be strictly limited, yet without sacrificing acceptable data rates. Pulsed Time-Hopping Ultra-Wide Band (TH-UWB) is a radio technology that has the potential to satisfy this requirement. Although TH-UWB is a multi-user radio technology, non-zero cross-correlation between time-hopping sequences, time-asynchronicity between sources and a multipath channel environment make it sensitive to strong interferers and near-far scenarios. While most protocols manage interference and multiple-access through power control or mutual exclusion (CSMA/CA or TDMA), we base our design on rate control, a relatively unexplored dimension for multiple-access and interference management. We further take advantage of the nature of pulsed TH-UWB to propose an interference mitigation scheme that reduces the impact of strong interferers. A source is always allowed to send and continuously adapts its channel code (hence its rate) to the interference experienced at the destination. In contrast to power control or exclusion, our MAC layer is local to sender and receiver and does not need coordination among neighbors not involved in the transmission. We show by simulation that we achieve a significant increase in network throughput

Evaluation of Interference-Cancellation Based MAC Protocols for Vehicular Communications

Vehicular communications form an important part of future intelligent transport systems. Wireless connectivity between vehicles can enhance safety in vehicular networks and enable new services such as adaptive traffic control, collision detection and avoidance. As several new algorithms are being developed for enhancing vehicle to vehicle wireless connectivity, it is important to validate the performance of these algorithms using reasonably accurate wireless channel models. Specifically, some recent developments in the medium access control (MAC) layer algorithms appear to have the potential to improve the performance of vehicle to vehicle communications; however, these algorithms have not been validated with realistic channel models encountered in vehicular communications. The aforementioned issues are addressed in this thesis and correspondingly, there are two main contributions - (i) A complete IEEE 802.11p based transceiver model has been simulated in MATLAB and its performance & reliability are tested using existing empirically-developed wireless channel models. (ii) A new MAC layer algorithm based on slotted ALOHA with successive interference cancellation(SIC) has been evaluated and tested by taking into consideration the performance of underlying physical layer. The performance of slotted ALOHA-SIC and the already existing carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) scheme with respect to channel access delay and average packet loss ratio is also studied

End-to-End Simulation of 5G mmWave Networks

Due to its potential for multi-gigabit and low latency wireless links, millimeter wave (mmWave) technology is expected to play a central role in 5th generation cellular systems. While there has been considerable progress in understanding the mmWave physical layer, innovations will be required at all layers of the protocol stack, in both the access and the core network. Discrete-event network simulation is essential for end-to-end, cross-layer research and development. This paper provides a tutorial on a recently developed full-stack mmWave module integrated into the widely used open-source ns--3 simulator. The module includes a number of detailed statistical channel models as well as the ability to incorporate real measurements or ray-tracing data. The Physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layers are modular and highly customizable, making it easy to integrate algorithms or compare Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) numerologies, for example. The module is interfaced with the core network of the ns--3 Long Term Evolution (LTE) module for full-stack simulations of end-to-end connectivity, and advanced architectural features, such as dual-connectivity, are also available. To facilitate the understanding of the module, and verify its correct functioning, we provide several examples that show the performance of the custom mmWave stack as well as custom congestion control algorithms designed specifically for efficient utilization of the mmWave channel.Comment: 25 pages, 16 figures, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials (revised Jan. 2018

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF INFORMATION PATHS IN DENSE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

In large-scale sensor networks with monitoring applications, sensor nodes are responsible to send periodic reports to the destination which is located far away from the area to be monitored. We model this area (referred to as the distributed source) with a positive load density function which determines the total rate of traffic generated inside any closed contour within the area. With tight limitations in energy consumption of wireless sensors and the many-to-one nature of communications in wireless sensor networks, the traditional definition of connectivity in graph theory does not seem to be sufficient to satisfy the requirements of sensor networks. In this work, a new notion of connectivity (called implementability) is defined which represents the ability of sensor nodes to relay traffic along a given direction field, referred to as information flow vector field $\vec{D}$. The magnitude of information flow is proportional to the traffic flux (per unit length) passing through any point in the network, and its direction is toward the flow of traffic. The flow field may be obtained from engineering knowledge or as a solution to an optimization problem. In either case, information flow flux lines represent a set of abstract paths (not constrained by the actual location of sensor nodes) which can be used for data transmission to the destination. In this work, we present conditions to be placed on $\vec{D}$ such that the resulting optimal vector field generates a desirable set of paths. In a sensor network with a given irrotational flow field $\vec{D}(x,y)$, we show that a density of $n(x,y)=O(|\vec{D}(x,y)|^2)$ sensor nodes is not sufficient to implement the flow field as $|\vec{D}|$ scales linearly to infinity. On the other hand, by increasing the density of wireless nodes to $n(x,y)=O(|\vec{D}(x,y)|^2 \log |\vec{D}(x,y)|)$, the flow field becomes implementable. Implementability requires more nodes than simple connectivity. However, results on connectivity are based on the implicit assumption of exhaustively searching all possible routes which contradicts the tight limitation of energy in sensor networks. We propose a joint MAC and routing protocol to forward traffic along the flow field. The proposed tier-based scheme can be further exploited to build lightweight protocol stacks which meet the specific requirements of dense sensor networks. We also investigate buffer scalability of sensor nodes routing along flux lines of a given irrotational vector field, and show that nodes distributed according to the sufficient bound provided above can relay traffic from the source to the destination with sensor nodes having limited buffer space. This is particularly interesting for dense wireless sensor networks where nodes are assumed to have very limited resources