Suitability of NB-IoT for indoor industrial environment: a survey and insights

The Internet of Things (IoT) and its applications in industrial settings are set to bring in the fourth industrial revolution. The industrial environment consisting of high profile manufacturing plants and a variety of equipment is inherently characterized by high reflectiveness, causing significant multi-path components that affect the propagation of wireless communications—a challenge among others that needs to be resolved. This paper provides a detailed insight into Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT), Industrial IoT (IIoT), and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) within the context of indoor industrial environments. It presents the applications of NB-IoT for industrial settings, such as the challenges associated with these applications. Furthermore, future research directions were put forth in the areas of NB-IoT network management using self-organizing network (SON) technology, edge computing for scalability enhancement, security in NB-IoT generated data, and proposing a suitable propagation model for reliable wireless communications

Lifetime Analysis of Error Control Schemes on Wireless Sensor Networks in Industrial Environments

Due to the harsh channel conditions of the industrial environment, the data transmission over wireless channel suffers from erroneous packets. The energy consumption of error control schemes is of vital importance for battery-powered Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In this paper, the performance evaluation of error control schemes namely, Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ), Forward Error Correction (FEC) and Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) in industrial environment in terms of energy efficiency is presented. The impact of the existing error control schemes on the industrial wireless sensor network lifetime is analyzed. A novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework is developed to maximize network lifetime. Performance results show that utilizing BCH (31,21,5) for Telos at the link layer maximizes the network lifetime while attaining the desired application reliability rate