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

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

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

Neighbor discovery for industrial wireless sensor networks with mobile nodes

Industrial wireless sensor networks can facilitate the deployment of a wide range of novel industrial applications, including mobile applications that connect mobile robots, vehicles, goods and workers to industrial networks. Current industrial wireless sensor standards have been mainly designed for static deployments, and their performance significantly degrades when introducing mobile devices. One of the major reasons for such degradation is the neighbor discovery process. This paper presents and evaluates two novel neighbor discovery protocols that improve the capability of mobile devices to remain connected to the industrial wireless sensor networks as they move. The proposed protocols exploit topology information and the nature of devices (static or mobile) to reliably and rapidly discover neighbor devices. This is achieved in some cases at the expense of increasing the number of radio resources utilized and the energy consumed in the discovery process. The proposed solutions have been designed and evaluated considering the WirelessHART standard given its widespread industrial adoption. However, they can also be adapted for the ISA100.11a and IEEE 802.15.4e standards.This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and FEDER funds under the project TEC2014-57146-Rby the Local Government of Valencia with reference ACIF/2013/060 and by the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 723909 (AUTOWARE project)

Integrating Battery-Less Energy Harvesting Devices in Multi-hop Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial wireless sensor networks enable real-time data collection, analysis, and control by interconnecting diverse industrial devices. In these industrial settings, power outlets are not always available, and reliance on battery power can be impractical due to the need for frequent battery replacement or stringent safety regulations. Battery-less energy harvesters present a suitable alternative for powering these devices. However, these energy harvesters, equipped with supercapacitors instead of batteries, suffer from intermittent on-off behavior due to their limited energy storage capacity. As a result, they struggle with extended or frequent energy-consuming phases of multi-hop network formation, such as network joining and synchronization. To address these challenges, our work proposes three strategies for integrating battery-less energy harvesting devices into industrial multi-hop wireless sensor networks. In contrast to other works, our work prioritizes the mitigation of intermittency-related issues, rather than focusing solely on average energy consumption, as is typically the case with battery-powered devices. For each of the proposed strategies, we provide an in-depth discussion of their suitability based on several critical factors, including the type of energy source, storage capacity, device mobility, latency, and reliability.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl

Development and integration of Honeywell’s One-Wireless network

The purpose of this project has been to develop upon the Honeywell One-Wireless network in the Murdoch University Pilot Plant and integrate it into the Distributed Control System. This will give future students exposure to developing process control schemes around industrial wireless technology in a small plant setting. Industrial Wireless is still on the cutting edge of technology and it will challenge the status quo in Industry with its many advantages. A brief review of Industrial wireless technology has been included in this thesis report to provide the reader a background to the communications technology. Also included is Honeywell’s One-Wireless Network solution which was used in this project. There, where significant challenges in getting the network operational, and as a result a systematic troubleshooting process was followed. Once the network was operational additional wireless instruments where added to expand the network and set up in the system. From here the One-Wireless network was integrated into the Distributive Control System which operates the pilot plant, this was done using Modbus TCP/IP. To determine the effectiveness of the network a post Radio Frequency assessment was carried out to determine the impact of the network and ensure that it was following best practices. Relevant documentation on the network was developed as a handover for future students to build upon the work carried out

Analysis of current and potential sensor network technologies and their incorporation as embedded structural system

This document provides a brief overview of the actual wireless ad hoc sensor networks technologies and standards available, especially in view of their possible implementation for shipping container protection and monitoring within the framework of the STEC Action aiming at analyzing possible technical solutions to improve the security of the millions of containers moving in and out of Europe. Examples of applications and research projects are reported from the literature to give insights on the possibility of implementation of wireless sensor networks in real world scenarios.JRC.G.5-European laboratory for structural assessmen

MAC Protocols for Industrial Delay-Sensitive Applications in Industry 4.0: Exploring Challenges, Protocols, and Requirements

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to enable Industry 4.0 through the extensive deployment of low-power devices. However, industrial applications require, most of the time, high reliability close to 100% and low end-to-end delays. This corresponds to very challenging objectives in wireless (lossy) environments. This delay can be disastrous in time-sensitive industrial IoT deployments where immediate detection and actions impact security, safety, and machine failures. With an efficient MAC protocol, data will be provided quickly to enable the IoT to be fully effective for mission-critical applications. Efficient medium sharing is even more difficult in IIoT due to ultra-low latency, high reliability, and high quality of service (QoS) compared to best-effort for IoT. This article does not survey all existing MAC protocols for IoTs, which was already done in other works. The goal of this paper is to analyze existing MAC protocols that are more suitable for IIoT

Wireless Technologies for Industry 4.0 Applications

Wireless technologies are increasingly used in industrial applications. These technologies reduce cabling, which is costly and troublesome, and introduce several benefits for their application in terms of flexibility to modify the layout of the nodes and scaling of the number of connected devices. They may also introduce new functionalities since they ease the connections to mobile devices or parts. Although they have some drawbacks, they are increasingly accepted in industrial applications, especially for monitoring and supervision tasks. Recently, they are starting to be accepted even for time-critical tasks, for example, in closed-loop control systems involving slow dynamic processes. However, wireless technologies have been evolving very quickly during the last few years, since several relevant technologies are available in the market. For this reason, it may become difficult to select the best alternative. This perspective article intends to guide application designers to choose the most appropriate technology in each case. For this purpose, this article discusses the most relevant wireless technologies in the industry and shows different examples of applications