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

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

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

Efficient Security Protocols for Constrained Devices

During the last decades, more and more devices have been connected to the Internet.Today, there are more devices connected to the Internet than humans.An increasingly more common type of devices are cyber-physical devices.A device that interacts with its environment is called a cyber-physical device.Sensors that measure their environment and actuators that alter the physical environment are both cyber-physical devices.Devices connected to the Internet risk being compromised by threat actors such as hackers.Cyber-physical devices have become a preferred target for threat actors since the consequence of an intrusion disrupting or destroying a cyber-physical system can be severe.Cyber attacks against power and energy infrastructure have caused significant disruptions in recent years.Many cyber-physical devices are categorized as constrained devices.A constrained device is characterized by one or more of the following limitations: limited memory, a less powerful CPU, or a limited communication interface.Many constrained devices are also powered by a battery or energy harvesting, which limits the available energy budget.Devices must be efficient to make the most of the limited resources.Mitigating cyber attacks is a complex task, requiring technical and organizational measures.Constrained cyber-physical devices require efficient security mechanisms to avoid overloading the systems limited resources.In this thesis, we present research on efficient security protocols for constrained cyber-physical devices.We have implemented and evaluated two state-of-the-art protocols, OSCORE and Group OSCORE.These protocols allow end-to-end protection of CoAP messages in the presence of untrusted proxies.Next, we have performed a formal protocol verification of WirelessHART, a protocol for communications in an industrial control systems setting.In our work, we present a novel attack against the protocol.We have developed a novel architecture for industrial control systems utilizing the Digital Twin concept.Using a state synchronization protocol, we propagate state changes between the digital and physical twins.The Digital Twin can then monitor and manage devices.We have also designed a protocol for secure ownership transfer of constrained wireless devices. Our protocol allows the owner of a wireless sensor network to transfer control of the devices to a new owner.With a formal protocol verification, we can guarantee the security of both the old and new owners.Lastly, we have developed an efficient Private Stream Aggregation (PSA) protocol.PSA allows devices to send encrypted measurements to an aggregator.The aggregator can combine the encrypted measurements and calculate the decrypted sum of the measurements.No party will learn the measurement except the device that generated it

Rapid Convergecast on Commodity Hardware: Performance Limits and Optimal Policies

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Security protocols suite for machine-to-machine systems

Nowadays, the great diffusion of advanced devices, such as smart-phones, has shown that there is a growing trend to rely on new technologies to generate and/or support progress; the society is clearly ready to trust on next-generation communication systems to face today’s concerns on economic and social fields. The reason for this sociological change is represented by the fact that the technologies have been open to all users, even if the latter do not necessarily have a specific knowledge in this field, and therefore the introduction of new user-friendly applications has now appeared as a business opportunity and a key factor to increase the general cohesion among all citizens. Within the actors of this technological evolution, wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) networks are becoming of great importance. These wireless networks are made up of interconnected low-power devices that are able to provide a great variety of services with little or even no user intervention. Examples of these services can be fleet management, fire detection, utilities consumption (water and energy distribution, etc.) or patients monitoring. However, since any arising technology goes together with its security threats, which have to be faced, further studies are necessary to secure wireless M2M technology. In this context, main threats are those related to attacks to the services availability and to the privacy of both the subscribers’ and the services providers’ data. Taking into account the often limited resources of the M2M devices at the hardware level, ensuring the availability and privacy requirements in the range of M2M applications while minimizing the waste of valuable resources is even more challenging. Based on the above facts, this Ph. D. thesis is aimed at providing efficient security solutions for wireless M2M networks that effectively reduce energy consumption of the network while not affecting the overall security services of the system. With this goal, we first propose a coherent taxonomy of M2M network that allows us to identify which security topics deserve special attention and which entities or specific services are particularly threatened. Second, we define an efficient, secure-data aggregation scheme that is able to increase the network lifetime by optimizing the energy consumption of the devices. Third, we propose a novel physical authenticator or frame checker that minimizes the communication costs in wireless channels and that successfully faces exhaustion attacks. Fourth, we study specific aspects of typical key management schemes to provide a novel protocol which ensures the distribution of secret keys for all the cryptographic methods used in this system. Fifth, we describe the collaboration with the WAVE2M community in order to define a proper frame format actually able to support the necessary security services, including the ones that we have already proposed; WAVE2M was funded to promote the global use of an emerging wireless communication technology for ultra-low and long-range services. And finally sixth, we provide with an accurate analysis of privacy solutions that actually fit M2M-networks services’ requirements. All the analyses along this thesis are corroborated by simulations that confirm significant improvements in terms of efficiency while supporting the necessary security requirements for M2M networks

Real-Time and Energy-Efficient Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

With the emergence of industrial standards such as WirelessHART, process industries are adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) that enable sensors and actuators to communicate through low-power wireless mesh networks. Industrial monitoring and control applications require real-time communication among sensors, controllers and actuators within end-to-end deadlines. Deadline misses may lead to production inefficiency, equipment destruction to irreparable financial and environmental impacts. Moreover, due to the large geographic area and harsh conditions of many industrial plants, it is labor-intensive or dan- gerous to change batteries of field devices. It is therefore important to achieve long network lifetime with battery-powered devices. This dissertation tackles these challenges and make a series of contributions. (1) We present a new end-to-end delay analysis for feedback control loops whose transmissions are scheduled based on the Earliest Deadline First policy. (2) We propose a new real-time routing algorithm that increases the real-time capacity of WSANs by exploiting the insights of the delay analysis. (3) We develop an energy-efficient routing algorithm to improve the network lifetime while maintaining path diversity for reliable communication. (4) Finally, we design a distributed game-theoretic algorithm to allocate sensing applications with near-optimal quality of sensing

Real-Time Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks for Cyber-Physical Systems

A cyber-physical system (CPS) employs tight integration of, and coordination between computational, networking, and physical elements. Wireless sensor-actuator networks provide a new communication technology for a broad range of CPS applications such as process control, smart manufacturing, and data center management. Sensing and control in these systems need to meet stringent real-time performance requirements on communication latency in challenging environments. There have been limited results on real-time scheduling theory for wireless sensor-actuator networks. Real-time transmission scheduling and analysis for wireless sensor-actuator networks requires new methodologies to deal with unique characteristics of wireless communication. Furthermore, the performance of a wireless control involves intricate interactions between real-time communication and control. This thesis research tackles these challenges and make a series of contributions to the theory and system for wireless CPS. (1) We establish a new real-time scheduling theory for wireless sensor-actuator networks. (2) We develop a scheduling-control co-design approach for holistic optimization of control performance in a wireless control system. (3) We design and implement a wireless sensor-actuator network for CPS in data center power management. (4) We expand our research to develop scheduling algorithms and analyses for real-time parallel computing to support computation-intensive CPS