Survey on wireless technology trade-offs for the industrial internet of things

Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment

Flexible Multimodal Sub-Gigahertz Communication for Heterogeneous Internet of Things Applications

To realize low-power and low-cost wireless communication over long distances, several wireless standards using sub-1 GHz frequencies have recently been proposed, each with their own strengths and weaknesses in terms of coverage, energy consumption, and throughput. However, none of them are currently flexible enough to satisfy the requirements of future dynamic and heterogeneous IoT applications. To alleviate this, a novel architecture that uses a multimodal device for flexibly employing a variety of heterogeneous sub-1 GHz wireless networks is proposed. It greatly increases network flexibility, resilience, and performance. A device design is presented together with an abstraction layer that combines the different networks into a single flexible virtual network substrate. The article elaborates on the qualitative advantages of this approach. Measurement-based simulation results show advantages in terms of energy efficiency, with significant reduction in energy use compared to a single-technology solution in a representative IoT track and trace scenario. Finally, the article identifies several open research challenges that need to be resolved to fully realize this vision of flexible multimodal communication for demanding IoT applications

Intra-network interference robustness : an empirical evaluation of IEEE 802.15.4-2015 SUN-OFDM

While IEEE 802.15.4 and its Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) medium access mode were developed as a wireless substitute for reliable process monitoring in industrial environments, most deployments use a single/static physical layer (PHY) configuration. Instead of limiting all links to the throughput and reliability of a single Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS), you can dynamically re-configure the PHY of link endpoints according to the context. However, such modulation diversity causes links to coincide in time/frequency space, resulting in poor reliability if left unchecked. Nonetheless, to some level, intentional spatial overlap improves resource efficiency while partially preserving the benefits of modulation diversity. Hence, we measured the mutual interference robustness of certain Smart Utility Network (SUN) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) configurations, as a first step towards combining spatial re-use and modulation diversity. This paper discusses the packet reception performance of those PHY configurations in terms of Signal to Interference Ratio (SIR) and time-overlap percentage between interference and targeted parts of useful transmissions. In summary, we found SUN-OFDM O3 MCS1 and O4 MCS2 performed best. Consequently, one should consider them when developing TSCH scheduling mechanisms in the search for resource efficient ubiquitous connectivity through modulation diversity and spatial re-use

Sub-GHz LPWAN network coexistence, management and virtualization : an overview and open research challenges

The IoT domain is characterized by many applications that require low-bandwidth communications over a long range, at a low cost and at low power. Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) fulfill these requirements by using sub-GHz radio frequencies (typically 433 or 868 MHz) with typical transmission ranges in the order of 1 up to 50 km. As a result, a single base station can cover large areas and can support high numbers of connected devices (> 1000 per base station). Notorious initiatives in this domain are LoRa, Sigfox and the upcoming IEEE 802.11ah (or "HaLow") standard. Although these new technologies have the potential to significantly impact many IoT deployments, the current market is very fragmented and many challenges exists related to deployment, scalability, management and coexistence aspects, making adoption of these technologies difficult for many companies. To remedy this, this paper proposes a conceptual framework to improve the performance of LPWAN networks through in-network optimization, cross-technology coexistence and cooperation and virtualization of management functions. In addition, the paper gives an overview of state of the art solutions and identifies open challenges for each of these aspects

An Efficient Algorithm in Computing Optimal Data Concentrator Unit Location in IEEE 802.15.4g AMI Networks

With a view to achieve several goals in the smart grid (SG) such as making the production and delivery of electricity more cost-effective as well as providing consumers with available information which assists them in controlling their cost, the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) system has been playing a major role to realize such goals. The AMI network, as an essential infrastructure, typically creates a two-way communication network between electricity consumers and the electric service provider for collecting of the big data generated from consumer’s smart meters (SM). Specifically, there is a crucial element called a data concentrator unit (DCU) employed to collect the boundless data from smart meters before disseminating to meter data management system (MDMS) in the AMI systems. Hence, the location of DCU has significantly impacted the quality of service (QoS) of AMI network, in particular the average throughput and delay. This work aims at developing an efficient algorithm in determining the minimum number of DCUs and computing their optimum locations in which smart meters can communicate through good quality wireless links in the AMI network by employing the IEEE 802.15.4g with unslotted CSMA/CA channel access mechanism. Firstly, the optimization algorithm computes the DCU location based on a minimum hop count metric. Nevertheless, it is possible that multiple positions achieving the minimum hop count may be found; therefore, the additional performance metric, i.e. the average throughput and delay, will be utilized to select the ultimately optimal location. In this paper, the maximum throughput with the acceptable averaged delay constraint is proposed by considering the behavior of the AMI meters, which is almost stationary in the AMI network. In our experiment, the algorithm is demonstrated in different scenarios with different densities of SM, including urban, suburban, and rural areas. The simulation results illustrate that the smart meter density and the environment have substantially impacted on a decision for DCU location, and the proposed methodology is significantly effective. Furthermore, the QoS in urban area, i.e. a highly populated area for SM, of the AMI network is better than those in the suburban and rural areas, where the SM density is quite sparse, because multiple available hops and routes created by neighboring meters in the dense area can help improve the average throughput and delay with the minimum hop count

The Environmental Impacts of Radio Frequency and Power Line Communication for Advanced Metering Infrastructures in Smart Grids

In the neighborhood area network (NAN), the advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) enables a bidirectional connection between the smart meter (SM) and the data concentrator (DC). Sensors, such as smart meter nodes or environmental sensor nodes, play a crucial role in measuring and transmitting data to central units for advanced monitoring, management, and analysis of energy consumption. Wired and wireless communication technologies are used to implement the AMI-NAN. This paper delves into a novel approach for optimizing the choice of communication medium, air for radio frequency (RF) or power lines for power line communication (PLC), between the SM and DC in the context of the AMI-NAN. The authors methodically select the specific technologies, RF and NB-PLC (narrowband power line communication), and meticulously characterize their attributes. Then, a comparative analysis spanning rural, urban, and industrial settings is conducted to evaluate the proposed method. The overall reliability performance of the AMI-NAN system requires a packet error rate (PER) lower than 10%. To this end, an efficient approach is introduced to assess and enhance the reliability of NB-PLC and RF for AMI-NAN applications. Simulation results demonstrate that wireless communication is the optimal choice for the rural scenario, especially for a signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) lower than 25 dB. However, in urban environments characterized by higher SNR values and moderately dense networks, NB-PLC gains prominence. In denser networks, it outperforms wireless communication, exhibiting a remarkable 10 dB gain for a bit error rate (BER) of 10−3. Moreover, in industrial zones characterized by intricate network topologies and non-linear loads, the power line channel emerges as the optimal choice for data transmission

Étude de la fiabilité des communications dans un réseau de capteurs sans-fils appliqué aux mines souterraines

Étude de la fiabilité des communications dans un réseau de capteurs sans-fils appliqué aux mines souterraines Certes, l’aspect sécurité est le plus préoccupant du travail dans les mines souterraines. Aujourd’hui, plusieurs équipements hautement technologiques sont utilisés dans la mine. Parmi ces équipements, nous pouvons distinguer les outils de communications. En effet, dans une mine bien équipée, plusieurs sortes de réseaux informatiques sont déployés à des fins de sécurité et de supervision. Dans ce contexte, les réseaux de capteurs sans-fils (RCSF) sont de plus en plus utilisés dans la mine. Cela s’explique par le fait que ce type de réseau orienté application apporte plusieurs avantages par rapport aux réseaux classiques à savoir le caractère sans-fils, le faible coût, la tolérance à la défaillance et la facilité de déploiement dans les zones à haut risque. Cependant, les RCSF imposent quelques limitations qui ne sont pas considérées dans les réseaux classiques dont notamment la consommation d’énergie et la gestion des informations. L'enjeu de l’utilisation des RCSF dans la mine est de mettre en place des communications efficaces énergétiquement qui tiennent compte des différentes contraintes imposées par les équipements hétérogènes. Dans cette optique, le standard IEEE 802.15.4 apparaît comme un standard de fait pour les RCSF. Le succès de cette norme est visible dans le fait qu’aujourd'hui, il y a plus de dix couches physiques différentes proposées comme extension à la norme IEEE 802.15.4. C’est dans ce contexte que se positionne l’objectif de notre travail. Il s’agit dans notre projet de faire l’étude des performances du standard IEEE 802.15.4 en comparaison avec l’extension IEEE 802.15.4g. L’étude comparative des standards IEEE 802.15.4/4g par simulation et par un banc d’essai a fait l’objet de nos travaux. Les résultats de simulation ont été démontrés pour différent scénarios d’utilisation

Comparação experimental do desempenho de tecnologias emergentes de low power wide area networks para IoT

Orientadores: Gustavo Fraidenraich, Eduardo Rodrigues de LimaDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: Esta dissertação apresenta resultados experimentais para a avaliação de dois circuitos integrados para conectividade IoT, usando uma abordagem sistemática. Um dos circuitos é dedicado a LoRa, enquanto o outro utiliza o padrão IEEE 802.15.4g adotado pela Wi-SUN Alliance. O objetivo desta avaliação é apresentar resultados que possam ajudar todos que pretendem utilizar LoRa, IEEE 802.15.4g/Wi-SUN ou outras opções de conectividade, facilitando a comparação entre essas tecnologias de forma justa e coerente. Os resultados mostram que existem diferenças entre os valores apresentados nos datasheet e os valores medidos durante os experimentos. Existem várias razões que justificam essas divergências, como a configuração dos experimentos, calibração dos equipamentos, o tamanho dos pacotes transmitidos e até as especificações dos testes. Esse resultado reforça a importância de uma abordagem sistemática para a comparação entre tecnologiasAbstract: This dissertation presents experimental results on the evaluation of two commercial integrated circuits for IoT connectivity, using a systematic approach. One of the integrated circuits is devoted to LoRa and the other to IEEE 802.15.4g, which is the physical layer adopted by the WI-SUN Alliance. The goal behind this evaluation is to present results to support those who will make use of LoRa, IEEE802.15.4g/Wi-SUN, or other types of connectivity to fairly compare the technologies. The results show that there are differences between datasheet values and the measures collected during the experiments. There are several reasons for this divergence, such as the experimental setup, equipment calibration, transmitted packet length, and test specifications. This highlights the importance of a systematical approach when comparing technologiesMestradoTelecomunicações e TelemáticaMestre em Engenharia Elétric