Control-guided Communication: Efficient Resource Arbitration and Allocation in Multi-hop Wireless Control Systems

In future autonomous systems, wireless multi-hop communication is key to enable collaboration among distributed agents at low cost and high flexibility. When many agents need to transmit information over the same wireless network, communication becomes a shared and contested resource. Event-triggered and self-triggered control account for this by transmitting data only when needed, enabling significant energy savings. However, a solution that brings those benefits to multi-hop networks and can reallocate freed up bandwidth to additional agents or data sources is still missing. To fill this gap, we propose control-guided communication, a novel co-design approach for distributed self-triggered control over wireless multi-hop networks. The control system informs the communication system of its transmission demands ahead of time, and the communication system allocates resources accordingly. Experiments on a cyber-physical testbed show that multiple cart-poles can be synchronized over wireless, while serving other traffic when resources are available, or saving energy. These experiments are the first to demonstrate and evaluate distributed self-triggered control over low-power multi-hop wireless networks at update rates of tens of milliseconds.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in: IEEE Control Systems Letter

Design of a reliable but low-cost wireless industrial network system using a bluetooth low energy Mesh network

Capstone Project submitted to the Department of Engineering, Ashesi University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Electronic Engineering, May 2020Many modern industrial plants have sensor actuator networks that allow operators on an industrial plant to receive data from sensors and send information to Actuators to operate plants efficiently. Most energy plants in Ghana such as Sony Asogli and Volta River Authorities Tema Thermal complex use guided media as a means of data communication. Guided media which is wired data communication has a couple of drawbacks. Problems with guided media include flexibility in re-arranging the sensor actuator topology in the plant. Another issue is the initial cost of wiring an entire plant. To make data communication between sensor actuators and operators on a plant more flexible in deployment the use of some suitable unguided media must be applied. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh was the selected wireless media protocol due to its wide range, low power consumption constraints and interoperability due to a good number of devices having Bluetooth capability. My setup included multiple ESP 32 node MCU microcontrollers and a BLE compatible phone. Data from sensors could be received over long distance in real time using a flood mesh hopping algorithm. The experiment was a success and proved that BLE mesh can be used as a replacement for the traditional wired sensor networks.Ashesi Universit

Internet of Things in Asset Management: Insights from Industrial Professionals and Academia

The emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies could rationalize data processes from acquisition to decision making if future research is focused on the exact needs of industry. This article contributes to this field by examining and categorizing the applications available through IoT technologies in the management of industrial asset groups. Previous literature and a number of industrial professionals and academic experts are used to identify the feasibility of IoT technologies in asset management. This article describes a preliminary study, which highlights the research potential of specific IoT technologies, for further research related to smart factories of the future. Based on the results of literature review and empirical panels IoT technologies have significant potential to be applied widely in the management of different asset groups. For example, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technologies are recognized to be potential in the management of inventories, sensor technologies in the management of machinery, equipment and buildings, and the naming technologies are potential in the management of spare parts.</jats:p

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

Maximizing Network Lifetime of Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks under Graph Routing

Process industries are adopting wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) as the communication infrastructure. The dynamics of industrial environments and stringent reliability requirements necessitate high degrees of fault tolerance in routing. WirelessHART is an open industrial standard for WSANs that have seen world-wide deployments. WirelessHART employs graph routing schemes to achieve network reliability through multiple paths. Since many industrial devices operate on batteries in harsh environments where changing batteries are prohibitively labor-intensive, WSANs need to achieve long network lifetime. To meet industrial demand for long-term reliable communication, this paper studies the problem of maximizing network lifetime for WSANs under graph routing. We formulate the network lifetime maximization problem for WirelessHART networks under graph routing. Then, we propose the optimal algorithm and two more efficient algorithms to prolong the network lifetime of WSANs. Experiments in a physical testbed and simulations show our linear programming relaxation and greedy heuristics can improve the network lifetime by up to 50% while preserving the reliability benefits of graph routing