12,399 research outputs found
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
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
To mesh or not to mesh: flexible wireless indoor communication among mobile robots in industrial environments
Mobile robots such as automated guided vehicles become increasingly important in industry as they can greatly increase efficiency. For their operation such robots must rely on wireless communication, typically realized by connecting them to an existing enterprise network. In this paper we motivate that such an approach is not always economically viable or might result in performance issues. Therefore we propose a flexible and configurable mixed architecture that leverages on mesh capabilities whenever appropriate. Through experiments on a wireless testbed for a variety of scenarios, we analyse the impact of roaming, mobility and traffic separation and demonstrate the potential of our approach
Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?
The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks
has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily
reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this
concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key
component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic
patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to
these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly
reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN
introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of
dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control
requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN
Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed
other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable
performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We
evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how
utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN
control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against
other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and
establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across
latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics
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
Isolating SDN Control Traffic with Layer-2 Slicing in 6TiSCH Industrial IoT Networks
Recent standardization efforts in IEEE 802.15.4-2015 Time Scheduled Channel
Hopping (TSCH) and the IETF 6TiSCH Working Group (WG), aim to provide
deterministic communications and efficient allocation of resources across
constrained Internet of Things (IoT) networks, particularly in Industrial IoT
(IIoT) scenarios. Within 6TiSCH, Software Defined Networking (SDN) has been
identified as means of providing centralized control in a number of key
situations. However, implementing a centralized SDN architecture in a Low Power
and Lossy Network (LLN) faces considerable challenges: not only is controller
traffic subject to jitter due to unreliable links and network contention, but
the overhead generated by SDN can severely affect the performance of other
traffic. This paper proposes using 6TiSCH tracks, a Layer-2 slicing mechanism
for creating dedicated forwarding paths across TSCH networks, in order to
isolate the SDN control overhead. Not only does this prevent control traffic
from affecting the performance of other data flows, but the properties of
6TiSCH tracks allows deterministic, low-latency SDN controller communication.
Using our own lightweight SDN implementation for Contiki OS, we firstly
demonstrate the effect of SDN control traffic on application data flows across
a 6TiSCH network. We then show that by slicing the network through the
allocation of dedicated resources along a SDN control path, tracks provide an
effective means of mitigating the cost of SDN control overhead in IEEE
802.15.4-2015 TSCH networks
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