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

A Survey on Communication Networks for Electric System Automation

Published in Computer Networks 50 (2006) 877–897, an Elsevier journal. The definitive version of this publication is available from Science Direct. Digital Object Identifier:10.1016/j.comnet.2006.01.005In today’s competitive electric utility marketplace, reliable and real-time information become the key factor for reliable delivery of power to the end-users, profitability of the electric utility and customer satisfaction. The operational and commercial demands of electric utilities require a high-performance data communication network that supports both existing functionalities and future operational requirements. In this respect, since such a communication network constitutes the core of the electric system automation applications, the design of a cost-effective and reliable network architecture is crucial. In this paper, the opportunities and challenges of a hybrid network architecture are discussed for electric system automation. More specifically, Internet based Virtual Private Networks, power line communications, satellite communications and wireless communications (wireless sensor networks, WiMAX and wireless mesh networks) are described in detail. The motivation of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the hybrid network architecture that can provide heterogeneous electric system automation application requirements. In this regard, our aim is to present a structured framework for electric utilities who plan to utilize new communication technologies for automation and hence, to make the decision making process more effective and direct.This work was supported by NEETRAC under Project #04-157

PFPS: Priority-First Packet Scheduler for IEEE 802.15.4 Heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents priority-first packet scheduling approach for heterogeneous traffic flows in low data rate heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSNs). A delay sensitive or emergency event occurrence demands the data delivery on the priority basis over regular monitoring sensing applications. In addition, handling sudden multi-event data and achieving their reliability requirements distinctly becomes the challenge and necessity in the critical situations. To address this problem, this paper presents distributed approach of managing data transmission for simultaneous traffic flows over multi-hop topology, which reduces the load of a sink node; and helps to make a life of the network prolong. For this reason, heterogeneous traffic flows algorithm (CHTF) algorithm classifies the each incoming packets either from source nodes or downstream hop node based on the packet priority and stores them into the respective queues. The PFPS-EDF and PFPS-FCFS algorithms present scheduling for each data packets using priority weight. Furthermore, reporting rate is timely updated based on the queue level considering their fairness index and processing rate. The reported work in this paper is validated in ns2 (ns2.32 allinone) simulator by putting the network into each distinct cases for validation of presented work and real time TestBed. The protocol evaluation presents that the distributed queue-based PFPS scheduling mechanism works efficiently using CSMA/CA MAC protocol of the IEEE 802.15.4 sensor networks

Congestion control protocols in wireless sensor networks: A survey

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by the lossy communication medium, application diversity, dense deployment, limited processing power and storage capacity, frequent topology change. All these limitations provide significant and unique design challenges to data transport control in wireless sensor networks. An effective transport protocol should consider reliable message delivery, energy-efficiency, quality of service and congestion control. The latter is vital for achieving a high throughput and a long network lifetime. Despite the huge number of protocols proposed in the literature, congestion control in WSN remains challenging. A review and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art protocols from the literature up to 2013 is provided in this paper. First, depending on the control policy, the protocols are divided into resource control vs. traffic control. Traffic control protocols are either reactive or preventive (avoiding). Reactive solutions are classified following the reaction scale, while preventive solutions are split up into buffer limitation vs. interference control. Resource control protocols are classified according to the type of resource to be tuned. © 2014 IEEE

KFOA: K-mean clustering, Firefly based data rate Optimization and ACO routing for Congestion Control in WSN

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is assortment of sensor nodes proficient in environmental information sensing, refining it and transmitting it to base station in sovereign manner. The minute sensors communicate themselves to sense and monitor the environment. The main challenges are limited power, short communication range, low bandwidth and limited processing. The power source of these sensor nodes are the main hurdle in design of energy efficient network. The main objective of the proposed clustering and data transmission algorithm is to augment network performance by using swarm intelligence approach. This technique is based on K-mean based clustering, data rate optimization using firefly optimization algorithm and Ant colony optimization based data forwarding. The KFOA is divided in three parts: (1) Clustering of sensor nodes using K-mean technique and (2) data rate optimization for controlling congestion and (3) using shortest path for data transmission based on Ant colony optimization (ACO) technique. The performance is analyzed based on two scenarios as with rate optimization and without rate optimization. The first scenario consists of two operations as k- mean clustering and ACO based routing. The second scenario consists of three operations as mentioned in KFOA. The performance is evaluated in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio, energy dissipation and residual energy analysis. The simulation results show improvement in performance by using with rate optimization technique