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

Performance Analysis and Improvement of WPAN MAC for Home Networks

The wireless personal area network (WPAN) is an emerging wireless technology for future short range indoor and outdoor communication applications. The IEEE 802.15.3 medium access control (MAC) is proposed to coordinate the access to the wireless medium among the competing devices, especially for short range and high data rate applications in home networks. In this paper we use analytical modeling to study the performance analysis of WPAN (IEEE 802.15.3) MAC in terms of throughput, efficient bandwidth utilization, and delay with various ACK policies under error channel condition. This allows us to introduce a K-Dly-ACK-AGG policy, payload size adjustment mechanism, and Improved Backoff algorithm to improve the performance of the WPAN MAC. Performance evaluation results demonstrate the impact of our improvements on network capacity. Moreover, these results can be very useful to WPAN application designers and protocol architects to easily and correctly implement WPAN for home networking

Performance enhancements for single hop and multi-hop meshed high data rate wireless personal area networks

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The High Data Rate (HDR) Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) typically have a limited operating range and are intended to support demanding multi-media applications at high data rates. In order to extend the communication range, HDR WPANs can operate in a wireless mesh configuration (i.e. enable multiple WPAN clusters) to communicate in a multi-hop fashion. HDR WPANs face several research challenges and some of the open key issues are limited capacity, optimum resource allocation to requesting devices and maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) for real time multimedia flows. Although, there have been some scheduling algorithms proposed for HDR WPANs, the main objective is to maintain the QoS in most cases whereas efficient and fair utilization of network capacity is still largely open for research. This thesis mainly intends to resolve the issues related to capacity of HDR WPANs such as admission control, fair allocation of Channel Time Allocations (CTAs), improvement in capacity through transmission power control, and efficient utilization of time by each flow. A technique which re-orders the time slots to reduce queuing delay for meshed WPANs is also proposed and evaluated. The first contribution aims to improve peer-to-peer connectivity in case of two or more independent piconet devices by proposing an inter-PAN communication framework that is augmented by an admission control strategy to handle the cases when the superframe capacity is congested. The queued devices are prioritized by proposing a parameter called the Rejection Ratio. The second contribution consists of a resource allocation framework for meshed WPANs. The main objectives are to reduce the control traffic due to high volume of channel time reservation requests and introduce an element of fairness in the channel time allocated to requesting devices. The objectives are achieved by using traffic prediction techniques and an estimated backoff procedure to reduce control traffic, and define different policies based on offered traffic for fair allocation of channel time. The centralized scheme uses traffic prediction techniques to use the proposed concept of bulk reservations. Based on the bulk reservations and resource allocation policies, the overall overhead is reduced while an element of fairness is shown to be maintained for certain scenarios. In the third contribution, the concepts of Time Efficiency and CTA switching are introduced to improve communication efficiency and utilization of superframe capacity in meshed WPANs. Two metrics known as Switched Time Slot (STS) and Switched Time Slot with Re-ordering (STS-R) are proposed which aim to achieve the purpose. The final contribution proposes and evaluates a technique called CTA overlappnig to improve capacity in single hop and meshed WPANs using tramission power control. Extensive simulation studies are performed to analyze and to evaluate the proposed techniques. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in meshed WPANs performance in terms of capacity utilization, improvement in fairness index for CTA allocation by upto 62% in some cases, reduction in control traffic overhead by upto 70% and reduction in delay for real time flows by more than 10% in some cases

A RPL based adaptive and scalable data-collection protocol module for NS-3 simulation platform

International audienceThis paper presents data-collection protocol framework based on RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks) for NS-3 (Network Simulator 3) simulation platform. Its design, implementation, simple examples of operations and evaluations will also be demonstrated. The conclusions and future developments are located in the final part of this paper

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Trustworthy Wireless Personal Area Networks

In the Internet of Things (IoT), everyday objects are equipped with the ability to compute and communicate. These smart things have invaded the lives of everyday people, being constantly carried or worn on our bodies, and entering into our homes, our healthcare, and beyond. This has given rise to wireless networks of smart, connected, always-on, personal things that are constantly around us, and have unfettered access to our most personal data as well as all of the other devices that we own and encounter throughout our day. It should, therefore, come as no surprise that our personal devices and data are frequent targets of ever-present threats. Securing these devices and networks, however, is challenging. In this dissertation, we outline three critical problems in the context of Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and present our solutions to these problems. First, I present our Trusted I/O solution (BASTION-SGX) for protecting sensitive user data transferred between wirelessly connected (Bluetooth) devices. This work shows how in-transit data can be protected from privileged threats, such as a compromised OS, on commodity systems. I present insights into the Bluetooth architecture, Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX), and how a Trusted I/O solution can be engineered on commodity devices equipped with SGX. Second, I present our work on AMULET and how we successfully built a wearable health hub that can run multiple health applications, provide strong security properties, and operate on a single charge for weeks or even months at a time. I present the design and evaluation of our highly efficient event-driven programming model, the design of our low-power operating system, and developer tools for profiling ultra-low-power applications at compile time. Third, I present a new approach (VIA) that helps devices at the center of WPANs (e.g., smartphones) to verify the authenticity of interactions with other devices. This work builds on past work in anomaly detection techniques and shows how these techniques can be applied to Bluetooth network traffic. Specifically, we show how to create normality models based on fine- and course-grained insights from network traffic, which can be used to verify the authenticity of future interactions