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

Distributed Optimal Rate-Reliability-Lifetime Tradeoff in Wireless Sensor Networks

The transmission rate, delivery reliability and network lifetime are three fundamental but conflicting design objectives in energy-constrained wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we address the optimal rate-reliability-lifetime tradeoff with link capacity constraint, reliability constraint and energy constraint. By introducing the weight parameters, we combine the objectives at rate, reliability, and lifetime into a single objective to characterize the tradeoff among them. However, the optimization formulation of the rate-reliability-reliability tradeoff is neither separable nor convex. Through a series of transformations, a separable and convex problem is derived, and an efficient distributed Subgradient Dual Decomposition algorithm (SDD) is proposed. Numerical examples confirm its convergence. Also, numerical examples investigate the impact of weight parameters on the rate utility, reliability utility and network lifetime, which provide a guidance to properly set the value of weight parameters for a desired performance of WSNs according to the realistic application's requirements.Comment: 27 pages, 10 figure

Two-Hop Routing with Traffic-Differentiation for QoS Guarantee in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a Traffic-Differentiated Two-Hop Routing protocol for Quality of Service (QoS) in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). It targets WSN applications having different types of data traffic with several priorities. The protocol achieves to increase Packet Reception Ratio (PRR) and reduce end-to-end delay while considering multi-queue priority policy, two-hop neighborhood information, link reliability and power efficiency. The protocol is modular and utilizes effective methods for estimating the link metrics. Numerical results show that the proposed protocol is a feasible solution to addresses QoS service differenti- ation for traffic with different priorities.Comment: 13 page

Greening and Optimizing Energy Consumption of Sensor Nodes in the Internet of Things through Energy Harvesting: Challenges and Approaches

This paper presents a survey of current energy efficient technologies that could drive the IoT revolution while examining critical areas for energy improvements in IoT sensor nodes. The paper reviews improvements in emerging energy techniques which promise to revolutionize the IoT landscape. Moreover, the current work also studies the sources of energy consumption by the IoT sensor nodes in a network and the metrics adopted by various researchers in optimizing the energy consumption of these nodes. Increasingly, researchers are exploring better ways of sourcing sufficient energy along with optimizing the energy consumption of IoT sensor nodes and making these energy sources green. Energy harvesting is the basis of this new energy source. The harvested energy could serve both as the principal and alternative energy source of power and thus increase the energy constancy of the IoT systems by providing a green, sufficient and optimal power source among IoT devices. Communication of IoT nodes in a heterogeneous IoT network consumes a lot of energy and the energy level in the nodes depletes with time. There is the need to optimize the energy consumption of such nodes and the current study discusses this as well

Real-Time and Energy-Efficient Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

With the emergence of industrial standards such as WirelessHART, process industries are adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) that enable sensors and actuators to communicate through low-power wireless mesh networks. Industrial monitoring and control applications require real-time communication among sensors, controllers and actuators within end-to-end deadlines. Deadline misses may lead to production inefficiency, equipment destruction to irreparable financial and environmental impacts. Moreover, due to the large geographic area and harsh conditions of many industrial plants, it is labor-intensive or dan- gerous to change batteries of field devices. It is therefore important to achieve long network lifetime with battery-powered devices. This dissertation tackles these challenges and make a series of contributions. (1) We present a new end-to-end delay analysis for feedback control loops whose transmissions are scheduled based on the Earliest Deadline First policy. (2) We propose a new real-time routing algorithm that increases the real-time capacity of WSANs by exploiting the insights of the delay analysis. (3) We develop an energy-efficient routing algorithm to improve the network lifetime while maintaining path diversity for reliable communication. (4) Finally, we design a distributed game-theoretic algorithm to allocate sensing applications with near-optimal quality of sensing

Optimal power control in green wireless sensor networks with wireless energy harvesting, wake-up radio and transmission control

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are autonomous networks of spatially distributed sensor nodes which are capable of wirelessly communicating with each other in a multi-hop fashion. Among different metrics, network lifetime and utility and energy consumption in terms of carbon footprint are key parameters that determine the performance of such a network and entail a sophisticated design at different abstraction levels. In this paper, wireless energy harvesting (WEH), wake-up radio (WUR) scheme and error control coding (ECC) are investigated as enabling solutions to enhance the performance of WSNs while reducing its carbon footprint. Specifically, a utility-lifetime maximization problem incorporating WEH, WUR and ECC, is formulated and solved using distributed dual subgradient algorithm based on Lagrange multiplier method. It is discussed and verified through simulation results to show how the proposed solutions improve network utility, prolong the lifetime and pave the way for a greener WSN by reducing its carbon footprint

Real-Time Link-Reliability Routing for QoS in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a Real-Time Link Reliability Routing protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The protocol achieves to reduce packet deadline miss ratio while considering link reliability, two-hop velocity and power efficiency and utilizes memory and computational effective methods for estimating the link metrics. Numerical results provide insights that the protocol has a lower packet deadline miss ratio and improved sensor network lifetime. The results show that the proposed protocol is a feasible solution to the QoS routing problem in wireless sensor networks that support real-time applications