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

Evolving SDN for Low-Power IoT Networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a flexible and scalable architecture that abstracts decision making away from individual devices and provides a programmable network platform. However, implementing a centralized SDN architecture within the constraints of a low-power wireless network faces considerable challenges. Not only is controller traffic subject to jitter due to unreliable links and network contention, but the overhead generated by SDN can severely affect the performance of other traffic. This paper addresses the challenge of bringing high-overhead SDN architecture to IEEE 802.15.4 networks. We explore how traditional SDN needs to evolve in order to overcome the constraints of low-power wireless networks, and discuss protocol and architectural optimizations necessary to reduce SDN control overhead - the main barrier to successful implementation. We argue that interoperability with the existing protocol stack is necessary to provide a platform for controller discovery and coexistence with legacy networks. We consequently introduce {\mu}SDN, a lightweight SDN framework for Contiki, with both IPv6 and underlying routing protocol interoperability, as well as optimizing a number of elements within the SDN architecture to reduce control overhead to practical levels. We evaluate {\mu}SDN in terms of latency, energy, and packet delivery. Through this evaluation we show how the cost of SDN control overhead (both bootstrapping and management) can be reduced to a point where comparable performance and scalability is achieved against an IEEE 802.15.4-2012 RPL-based network. Additionally, we demonstrate {\mu}SDN through simulation: providing a use-case where the SDN configurability can be used to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for critical network flows experiencing interference, and we achieve considerable reductions in delay and jitter in comparison to a scenario without SDN

A survey on subjecting electronic product code and non-ID objects to IP identification

Over the last decade, both research on the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-world IoT applications have grown exponentially. The IoT provides us with smarter cities, intelligent homes, and generally more comfortable lives. However, the introduction of these devices has led to several new challenges that must be addressed. One of the critical challenges facing interacting with IoT devices is to address billions of devices (things) around the world, including computers, tablets, smartphones, wearable devices, sensors, and embedded computers, and so on. This article provides a survey on subjecting Electronic Product Code and non-ID objects to IP identification for IoT devices, including their advantages and disadvantages thereof. Different metrics are here proposed and used for evaluating these methods. In particular, the main methods are evaluated in terms of their: (i) computational overhead, (ii) scalability, (iii) adaptability, (iv) implementation cost, and (v) whether applicable to already ID-based objects and presented in tabular format. Finally, the article proves that this field of research will still be ongoing, but any new technique must favorably offer the mentioned five evaluative parameters.Comment: 112 references, 8 figures, 6 tables, Journal of Engineering Reports, Wiley, 2020 (Open Access

A Review of 6LoWPAN Routing Protocols

Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group has standardized the transmission ofinternet protocol version 6 (IPv6) packets over IEEE 802.15.4 low power wireless personal areanetwork (LoWPAN) as 6LoWPAN protocol. It provides the wireless sensor network (WSN) node withIP communication capabilities by putting an adaptation layer above the 802.15.4 link layer. Differentmechanisms performed by adaptation layer require the 6LoWPAN header encapsulation in the packet.Although routing is among the key issues of 6LoWPAN research, the way to encapsulate a new routingheader in the 6LoWPAN packet has yet been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, different ways ofrouting header encapsulation in 6LoWPAN protocol stack is discussed. The simplified version Ad-HocOn-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) such as On-Demand Distance Vector (LOAD) and DynamicMANET On-demand for 6LoWPAN (DYMO-low) have currently been proposed in 6LoWPANrouting. Hierarchical routing (HiLow) is another routing protocol that is used in 6LoWPAN to increasethe network scalability. Some comparisons of these routing protocols have been made in terms of theirrouting metric such as number of hops count. The used control messages for the route discovery indifferent routing protocols have also been investigated. These comparisons show that each routingprotocol has its own advantage depends on the involved applications. There are some tradeoffs ofrespective routing protocols. The routing protocol that uses hello message may provide more reliablebut results a higher delay in the packet routing

A Study On Protocol Stack In 6lowpan Model

Due to recent advances of heterogeneous network and the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT), wireless personal area networks including wireless sensor networks are assumed to be part of the huge heterogeneous network. This calls for a smooth integration between the higher network layer protocols Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and the lower media access control (MAC) layer protocol IEEE 802.15.4. IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard that specifies the physical layer and MAC layer for Wireless Personal Area Network (WPAN). This standard is suited for Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs), a constrained network of tiny, low power, low rate, small size memory with low computation and communication capabilities. However, IPv6 is forming the backbone of the desired heterogeneous network. Direct integration between IPv6 and IEEE 802.15.4 lower network layers is not possible. Hence, latest technology development is the transmission of IPv6 packets over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). This has enforced some modification to the existing protocol stack and introduced the 6LoWPAN protocol stack. The 6LoWPAN protocol stack involves 802.15.4 physical (PHY) and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, 6LoWPAN adaptation layer, network layer, transport layer and application layer with specific 6LoWPAN application. This review paper describes all layers in 6LoWPAN protocol stack including its routing protocols, namely the Route-over and Mesh-under. These routing schemes are applied in 6LoWPAN adaptation layer and network layer

Leveraging upon standards to build the Internet of things

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 were 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. Long time, most efforts were focusing on the networking layer. More recently, the IETF CoRE working group started working on an embedded counterpart of HTTP, allowing the integration of constrained devices into existing service networks. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, with a prime focus on the IETF standardization work in the ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is further complemented with some research results that illustrate how these novel technologies can be extended or used to tackle other problems.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2 007-2013) under grant agreement n°258885 (SPITFIRE project), from the iMinds ICON projects GreenWeCan and O’CareCloudS, and a VLI R PhD scholarship to Isam Ishaq