Goodbye, ALOHA!

©2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The vision of the Internet of Things (IoT) to interconnect and Internet-connect everyday people, objects, and machines poses new challenges in the design of wireless communication networks. The design of medium access control (MAC) protocols has been traditionally an intense area of research due to their high impact on the overall performance of wireless communications. The majority of research activities in this field deal with different variations of protocols somehow based on ALOHA, either with or without listen before talk, i.e., carrier sensing multiple access. These protocols operate well under low traffic loads and low number of simultaneous devices. However, they suffer from congestion as the traffic load and the number of devices increase. For this reason, unless revisited, the MAC layer can become a bottleneck for the success of the IoT. In this paper, we provide an overview of the existing MAC solutions for the IoT, describing current limitations and envisioned challenges for the near future. Motivated by those, we identify a family of simple algorithms based on distributed queueing (DQ), which can operate for an infinite number of devices generating any traffic load and pattern. A description of the DQ mechanism is provided and most relevant existing studies of DQ applied in different scenarios are described in this paper. In addition, we provide a novel performance evaluation of DQ when applied for the IoT. Finally, a description of the very first demo of DQ for its use in the IoT is also included in this paper.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

Wireless Sensor Technology Selection for I4.0 Manufacturing Systems

The term smart manufacturing has surfaced as an industrial revolution in Germany known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0); this revolution aims to help the manufacturers adapt to turbulent market trends. Its main scope is implementing machine communication, both vertically and horizontally across the manufacturing hierarchy through Internet of things (IoT), technologies and servitization concepts. The main objective of this research is to help manufacturers manage the high levels of variety and the extreme turbulence of market trends through developing a selection tool that utilizes Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) techniques to recommend a suitable industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN) technology that fits their manufacturing requirements.In this thesis, IWSN technologies and their properties were identified, analyzed and compared to identify their potential suitability for different industrial manufacturing system application areas. The study included the identification and analysis of different industrial system types, their application areas, scenarios and respective communication requirements. The developed tool’s sensitivity is also tested to recommend different IWSN technology options with changing influential factors. Also, a prioritizing protocol is introduced in the case where more than one IWSN technology options are recommended by the AHP tool.A real industrial case study with the collaboration of SPM Automation Inc. is presented, where the industrial systems’ class, communication traffic types, and communication requirements were analyzed to recommend a suitable IWSN technology that fits their requirements and assists their shift towards I4.0 through utilizing AHP techniques. The results of this research will serve as a step forward, in the transformation process of manufacturing towards a more digitalized and better connected cyber-physical systems; thus, enhancing manufacturing attributes such as flexibility, reconfigurability, scalability and easing the shift towards implementing I4.0

Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

Powerline Communication in Home-Building Automation Systems

Domotics, Smart Home Systems, Ambient Intelligence are all terms that describe the intelligent cooperation of several different equipments to manage the home environment in an intelligent, safe and comfortable way. The same idea is also applicable to bigger constructions, and in that case it takes the name of Building Automation. Whatever term one wants to use, it refers to a multidisciplinary field that includes informatics, electronics, automation and telecommunication, and also touches fields like building constructions and architecture. In fact, during the process of designing a building, people have to consider appropriate spaces for the electric plant, and if the presence of a domotic system is planned, it is better to take it into account during the design phase, just to optimize spaces, the amount of used wires, the position of the modules and so on. There are really many home system producers in the world (Smart Home Systems, EIB-Konnex, Lonworks, Bticino, Vimar, Duemmegi, EasyDom Corporation, Futurware, Digital Cybermasters, Hills Home Systems, Intellihome etc, just to mention a few) , and their products differ from each others in many characteristics, such as functionality, dimension, weight, typology of installation, materials, net topology, power consumes, aesthetic appearance, communication protocol and communication mean. Regarding this last point, the majority of the domotic systems, especially in Europe, tend to use a dedicated bus cable to exchange data among modules, to make the communication link more robust and reliable. Lately, using radio communication is in fashion, but radio modules, respect to their equivalent standard ones, are more expensive, and in the bargain many people don’t want to use them due to the fear of radio signals (even if it were proved that they are completely harmless). Another communication mean, that is often not taken into account, is the powerline. In point of fact, using the installed poweline wires to send information is a very smart idea: there is no additional cost to install other dozens of meters of wires, there is not the necessity to break the walls and to do building works at home, there are no interferences with other devices (like in the radio communication case) or reflection problems (like in the infrared case), there is the possibility to put the modules in every place (it is sufficient to have an electrical socket in the nearness, or to use an extension cable), there is no need to have an extra power source (usually, in a bus cable domotic system, there is a direct voltage generated by a power supply and distribuited on the whole domotic net). Moreover, powerline communication (PLC, also called BPL in the USA, where the acronym stays for Broadband over Power Line, or NPL, Narroband over Power Line) is not only used in a home environment to create a virtual net among domotic modules, but is also used on the power distribution net to perform actions like reading the electricity meter, monitoring the power consumes and the state of a building, finding faults along the net, detecting illegal electricity usages and to solve the so-called last mile problem , that is the problem related to the final leg of delivering connectivity from a communications provider to a customer. In fact a cheap possibility to cover this final leg is using powerline communication. The intent of this work is therefore to illustrate, going into more details, advantages and disadvantages of the powerline communication systems (PLCS), to show the differences between PLCS for power distribution net and PLCS for home and building environments, to indagate the methods to send data over the powerline, to explain which are the automations that is possible to connect and to control in a powerline domotic system and to show some case studies tackled by the authors