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

MIMO-OFDM Based Energy Harvesting Cooperative Communications Using Coalitional Game Algorithm

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version. 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.In this paper, we consider the problem of cooperative communication between relays and base station in an advanced MIMO-OFDM framework, under the assumption that the relays are supplied by electric power drawn from energy harvesting (EH) sources. In particular, we focus on the relay selection, with the goal to guarantee the required performance in terms of capacity. In order to maximize the data throughput under the EH constraint, we model the transmission scheme as a non-transferable coalition formation game, with characteristic function based on an approximated capacity expression. Then, we introduce a powerful mathematical tool inherent to coalitional game theory, namely: the Shapley value (Sv) to provide a reliable solution concept to the game. The selected relays will form a virtual dynamically-configuredMIMO network that is able to transmit data to destination using efficient space-time coding techniques. Numerical results, obtained by simulating the EH-powered cooperativeMIMO-OFDMtransmission with Algebraic Space-Time Coding (ASTC), prove that the proposed coalitional game-based relay selection allows to achieve performance very close to that obtained by the same system operated by guaranteed power supply. The proposed methodology is finally compared with some recent related state-of-the-art techniques showing clear advantages in terms of link performance and goodput.Peer reviewe