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

Minimizing Age of Collection for Multiple Access in Wireless Industrial Internet of Things

This paper investigates the information freshness of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems, where each IoT device makes a partial observation of a common target and transmits the information update to a central receiver to recover the complete observation. We consider the age of collection (AoC) performance as a measure of information freshness. Unlike the conventional age of information (AoI) metric, the instantaneous AoC decreases only when all cooperative packets for a common observation are successfully received. Hence, effectively allocating wireless time-frequency resources among IoT devices to achieve a low average AoC at the central receiver is paramount. Three multiple access schemes are considered in this paper: time-division multiple access (TDMA) without retransmission, TDMA with retransmission, and frequency-division multiple access (FDMA). First, our theoretical analysis indicates that TDMA with retransmission outperforms the other two schemes in terms of average AoC. Subsequently, we implement information update systems based on the three schemes on software-defined radios. Experimental results demonstrate that considering the medium access control (MAC) overhead in practice, FDMA achieves a lower average AoC than TDMA with or without retransmission in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. In contrast, TDMA with retransmission provides a stable and relatively low average AoC over a wide SNR range, which is favorable for IIoT applications. Overall, we present a theoretical-plus-experimental investigation of AoC in IIoT information update systems

Cooperative retransmission protocols in fading channels : issues, solutions and applications

Future wireless systems are expected to extensively rely on cooperation between terminals, mimicking MIMO scenarios when terminal dimensions limit implementation of multiple antenna technology. On this line, cooperative retransmission protocols are considered as particularly promising technology due to their opportunistic and flexible exploitation of both spatial and time diversity. In this dissertation, some of the major issues that hinder the practical implementation of this technology are identified and pertaining solutions are proposed and analyzed. Potentials of cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols for a practical implementation of dynamic spectrum access paradigm are also recognized and investigated. Detailed contributions follow. While conventionally regarded as energy efficient communications paradigms, both cooperative and retransmission concepts increase circuitry energy and may lead to energy overconsumption as in, e.g., sensor networks. In this context, advantages of cooperative retransmission protocols are reexamined in this dissertation and their limitation for short transmission ranges observed. An optimization effort is provided for extending an energy- efficient applicability of these protocols. Underlying assumption of altruistic relaying has always been a major stumbling block for implementation of cooperative technologies. In this dissertation, provision is made to alleviate this assumption and opportunistic mechanisms are designed that incentivize relaying via a spectrum leasing approach. Mechanisms are provided for both cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols, obtaining a meaningful upsurge of spectral efficiency for all involved nodes (source-destination link and the relays). It is further recognized in this dissertation that the proposed relaying-incentivizing schemes have an additional and certainly not less important application, that is in dynamic spectrum access for property-rights cognitive-radio implementation. Provided solutions avoid commons-model cognitive-radio strict sensing requirements and regulatory and taxonomy issues of a property-rights model

TOWARD LAYERLESS COOPERATION AND RATE CONTROL IN WIRELESS MULTI-ACCESS CHANNELS

In wireless networks, a transmitted message may successfully reach multiple nodes simultaneously, which is referred to as the Wireless Multicast Advantage. As such, intermediate nodes have the ability to capture the message and then contribute to the communication toward the ultimate destination by cooperatively relaying the received message. This enables cooperative communication, which has been shown to counteract the effects of fading and attenuation in wireless networks. There has been a great deal of work addressing cooperative methods and their resulting benefits, but most of the work to date has focused on physical-layer techniques and on information-theoretic considerations. While compatible with these, the main thrust of this dissertation is to explore a new approach by implementing cooperation at the network layer. First, we illustrate the idea in a multi-hop multi-access wireless network, in which a set of source users generate packets to deliver to a common destination. An opportunistic and dynamic cooperation protocol is proposed at the network level, where users with a better channel to the destination have the capability and option to relay packets from users that are farther afield. The proposed mode of cooperation protocol is new and relies on MAC/Network-level of relaying, but also takes into account physical-layer parameters that determine successful reception at the destination and/or the relay. We explicitly characterize the stable throughput and average delay performance. Our analysis reveals that cooperation at the network layer leads to substantial performance gains for both performance metrics. Next, on top of the network-layer cooperation, we investigate enhanced cooperative techniques that exploit more sophisticated physical-layer properties. Specifically, we consider dynamic decode-and-forward, superposition coding, and multipacket reception capability, and we quantify the extent to which the enhancement techniques can further improve the stable throughput region. Then we revert back to the two-user multi-access channel with single-packet reception, which has been extensively studied in the case of no cooperation. After cooperation is permitted between the two users, we revisit the relationship between the stability region and the throughput region under both scheduled access and random access schemes. Finally, we shift our focus from the packet-level to bit-level multi-access channels. By exploiting the bit-nature of a packet, we create a bridge between traditional physical-layer-based transmission rates and classical MAC/Network-layer-based throughput rates. We first obtain the closed form of the stability region in bits/slot. Then, as a separate, but related issue, we look at the minimum delivery time policy; for any initial queue size vector, the optimal policy that empties all bits in the system within the shortest time is characterized