Industry 4.0: Industrial IoT Enhancement and WSN Performance Analysis

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A Detailed Characterization of 60 GHz Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11ad)

The emergence of wireless local area network (WLAN) standards and the global system of mobile communication (GSM) in the early 1990s incited tremendous growth in the demand for wireless connectivity. Iterative technological enhancements to cellular and WLAN improved wireless capacity and created a breadth of new mobile applications. The continued increase in display resolutions and image quality combined with streaming displacing satellite/cable has created unprecedented demands on wireless infrastructure. Data-caps on cellular networks deter over consumption and increasingly shift the growing burden to Wi-Fi networks. The traditional 2.4/5 GHz Wi-Fi bands have become overloaded and the increasing number of wireless devices in the home, public, and workplace create difficult challenges to deliver quality service to large numbers of client stations. In dense urban areas, the wireless medium is subjected to increased interference due to overlapping networks and other devices communicating in the same frequency bands. Improvements to conventional Wi-Fi are approaching their theoretical limits and higher order enhancements require idealized conditions which are seldom attainable in practice. In an effort to supplant to scaling capacity requirements a very high frequency WLAN amendment has been proposed (IEEE 802.11ad). IEEE 802.11ad, also referred to as Wireless Gigabit (WiGig), operates in the globally unlicensed 60 GHz band and offers channel bandwidths nearly 100x as wide as 802.11n. The higher bandwidth facilitates multi-Gbps throughput even with the use of lower complexity modulation coding schemes (MCS). IEEE 802.11ad relies heavily on rate adaptation and high beamforming gain to mitigate interference and fading as signals in the 60 GHz band suffer from higher atmospheric ab- sorption and free space path loss (FSPL). Due to the unique nature of 60 GHz wireless there have been numerous research efforts. Many studies have been directed at simulation and modeling of the 60 GHz channel. However modeling the channel is difficult as real- world environments are highly dynamic with varying link quality and conditions which cannot be accurately predicted by conventional techniques. Some research is focused on medium access control (MAC) enhancements to improve overall capacity by coordinating concurrent links or reducing communication overhead for example. Lastly, there has been a limited amount of real world testing of 802.11ad due to lack of availability of commercial platforms and measurement instrumentation. Some researchers tested early generation devices in certain use cases such as in vehicles for media streaming, in data centers to augment the wired network, or in basic indoor and outdoor environments. This research contains two main components. In the first study, analytical models are applied to estimate line of sight (LOS) 802.11ad performance for realistic antenna param- eters. The second part contains a comprehensive evaluation of performance and reliability of early generation 802.11ad hardware. This characterization emphasizes environmen- tal performance (e.g. conference room, cubical farm, open office), multiple-client testing (multiclient), multiple network interference (spatial re-use), and stability in the presence of station mobility, physical obstructions, and antenna misalignment. In order to evaluate 802.11ad, early generation platforms from technology vendors were used in extensive test suites. The hardware tested included docks for wireless personal area networking (WPAN) applications, client laptop stations, and reference design access points (APs). Finally, a customized proof-of-concept (PoC) platform was engineered which allowed finer control over front end antenna configuration parameters such as: topology, placement and orienta- tion. The PoC also served as a suitable means to identify practical limitations and system design engineering challenges associated with supporting directional multi-Gbps (DMG) communication in the 60 GHz band

Watts2Share: Energy-Aware Traffic Consolidation

Energy consumption is becoming the Achilles' heel of the mobile user quality of experience partly due to undisciplined use of the cellular (3G) transmissions by applications. The operator infrastructure is typically configured for peak performance, whereas during periods of underutilisation the handsets pay the price by staying in high energy states even if each application only uses a fraction of the maximum available bandwidth. In this paper we promote a bi-radio scenario where instead of independently using own cellular connections, several users share a single cellular link offered by one member of a coalition (a rotating aggregator). We present Watts2Share, an architecture for energy-aware traffic consolidation whereby group members' data flows transmitted through a second radio (e.g., WiFi) are aggregated by the aggregator and retransmitted through the cellular link. Through careful and repeatable studies we demonstrate that this scheme saves up to 68% of the total transmission energy in handsets compared to a pure 3G scenario. The studies are based on a wide range of real traffic traces and real cellular operator settings, and further illustrate that this scheme reduces the overall energy by reducing the signalling overhead, as well as extending the lifetime of all handsets

Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments

Esta tesis nos ha permitido trasladar algunos conceptos teóricos de la computación ubicua a escenarios reales, identificando las necesidades específicas de diferentes tipos de aplicaciones. Con el fin de alcanzar este objetivo, proponemos dos prototipos que proporcionan servicios sensibles al contexto en diferentes entornos, tales como conferencias o salas de recuperación en hospitales. Estos prototipos experimentales explotan la tecnología Bluetooth para ofrecer información basada en las preferencias del usuario. En ambos casos, hemos llevado a cabo algunos experimentos con el fin de evaluar el comportamiento de los sistemas y su rendimento. También abordamos en esta tesis el problema de la autoconfiguración de redes MANET basadas en el estándar 802.11 a través de dos soluciones novedosas. La primera es una solución centralizada que se basa en la tecnología Bluetooth, mientras la segunda es una solución distribuida que no necesita recurrir a ninguna tecnología adicional, ya que se basa en el uso del parámetro SSID. Ambos métodos se han diseñado para permitir que usuarios no expertos puedan unirse a una red MANET de forma transparente, proporcionando una configuración automática, rápida, y fiable de los terminales. Los resultados experimentales en implementaciones reales nos han permitido evaluar el rendimiento de las soluciones propuestas y demostrar que las estaciones cercanas se pueden configurar en pocos segundos. Además, hemos comparado ambas soluciones entre sí para poner de manifiesto las diferentes ventajas y desventajas en cuanto a rendimento. La principal contribución de esta tesis es EasyMANET, una plataforma ampliable y configurable cuyo objetivo es automatizar lo máximo posible las tareas que afectan a la configuración y puesta en marcha de redes MANET, de modo que su uso sea más simple y accesible.Cano Reyes, J. (2012). Integrated Architecture for Configuration and Service Management in MANET Environments [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/14675Palanci

Improving the Performance of Wireless LANs

This book quantifies the key factors of WLAN performance and describes methods for improvement. It provides theoretical background and empirical results for the optimum planning and deployment of indoor WLAN systems, explaining the fundamentals while supplying guidelines for design, modeling, and performance evaluation. It discusses environmental effects on WLAN systems, protocol redesign for routing and MAC, and traffic distribution; examines emerging and future network technologies; and includes radio propagation and site measurements, simulations for various network design scenarios, numerous illustrations, practical examples, and learning aids

Toward Open and Programmable Wireless Network Edge

Increasingly, the last hop connecting users to their enterprise and home networks is wireless. Wireless is becoming ubiquitous not only in homes and enterprises but in public venues such as coffee shops, hospitals, and airports. However, most of the publicly and privately available wireless networks are proprietary and closed in operation. Also, there is little effort from industries to move forward on a path to greater openness for the requirement of innovation. Therefore, we believe it is the domain of university researchers to enable innovation through openness. In this thesis work, we introduce and defines the importance of open framework in addressing the complexity of the wireless network. The Software Defined Network (SDN) framework has emerged as a popular solution for the data center network. However, the promise of the SDN framework is to make the network open, flexible and programmable. In order to deliver on the promise, SDN must work for all users and across all networks, both wired and wireless. Therefore, we proposed to create new modules and APIs to extend the standard SDN framework all the way to the end-devices (i.e., mobile devices, APs). Thus, we want to provide an extensible and programmable abstraction of the wireless network as part of the current SDN-based solution. In this thesis work, we design and develop a framework, weSDN (wireless extension of SDN), that extends the SDN control capability all the way to the end devices to support client-network interaction capabilities and new services. weSDN enables the control-plane of wireless networks to be extended to mobile devices and allows for top-level decisions to be made from an SDN controller with knowledge of the network as a whole, rather than device centric configurations. In addition, weSDN easily obtains user application information, as well as the ability to monitor and control application flows dynamically. Based on the weSDN framework, we demonstrate new services such as application-aware traffic management, WLAN virtualization, and security management

Design and evaluation of a self-configuring wireless mesh network architecture

Wireless network connectivity plays an increasingly important role in supporting our everyday private and professional lives. For over three decades, self-organizing wireless multi-hop ad-hoc networks have been investigated as a decentralized replacement for the traditional forms of wireless networks that rely on a wired infrastructure. However, despite the tremendous efforts of the international wireless research community and widespread availability of devices that are able to support these networks, wireless ad-hoc networks are hardly ever used. In this work, the reasons behind this discrepancy are investigated. It is found that several basic theoretical assumptions on ad-hoc networks prove to be wrong when solutions are deployed in reality, and that several basic functionalities are still missing. It is argued that a hierarchical wireless mesh network architecture, in which specialized, multi-interfaced mesh nodes form a reliable multi-hop wireless backbone for the less capable end-user clients is an essential step in bringing the ad-hoc networking concept one step closer to reality. Therefore, in a second part of this work, algorithms increasing the reliability and supporting the deployment and management of these wireless mesh networks are developed, implemented and evaluated, while keeping the observed limitations and practical considerations in mind. Furthermore, the feasibility of the algorithms is verified by experiment. The performance analysis of these protocols and the ability to deploy the developed algorithms on current generation off-the-shelf hardware indicates the successfulness of the followed research approach, which combines theoretical considerations with practical implementations and observations. However, it was found that there are also many pitfalls to using real-life implementation as a research technique. Therefore, in the last part of this work, a methodology for wireless network research using real-life implementation is developed, allowing researchers to generate more reliable protocols and performance analysis results with less effort