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

Erasure Insertion in RS-Coded SFH MFSK Subjected to Tone Jamming and Rayleigh Fading

The achievable performance of Reed Solomon (RS) coded slow frequency hopping (SFH) assisted M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) using various erasure insertion (EI) schemes is investigated, when communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of multitone jamming. Three different EI schemes are considered, which are based on the output threshold test (OTT), on the ratio threshold test (RTT) and on the joint maximum output-ratio threshold test (MORTT). The relevant statistics of these EI schemes are investigated mathematically and based on these statistics, their performance is evaluated in the context of error-and-erasure RS decoding. It is demonstrated that the system performance can be significantly improved by using error-and-erasure decoding invoking the EI schemes considered. Index Terms—Tone jamming, OTT, RTT, MO-RTT, SFH, error-and-erasure decoding (EED)

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Erasure Insertion in RS-Coded SFH MFSK Subjected to Tone Jamming and Rayleigh Fading

The achievable performance of Reed Solomon (RS) coded slow frequency hopping (SFH) assisted M-ary frequency shift keying (MFSK) using various erasure insertion (EI) schemes is investigated, when communicating over uncorrelated Rayleigh fading channels in the presence of multitone jamming. Three different EI schemes are considered, which are based on the output threshold test (OTT), on the ratio threshold test (RTT) and on the joint maximum output-ratio threshold test (MO-RTT). The relevant statistics of these EI schemes are investigated mathematically and based on these statistics, their performance is evaluated in the context of error-and-erasure RS decoding. It is demonstrated that the system performance can be significantly improved by using error-and-erasure decoding invoking the EI schemes considered