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

A Distributed Management Scheme for supporting energy-harvested I/O devices

Current wireless technologies for industrial application, such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, are not designed to support harvester-powered input/output (I/O) devices, where energy availability varies in a non-deterministic manner. The centralized management approach of these standards makes it difficult and costly for harvester-powered I/O devices (sensor/actuators) to re-join in the network in case of power failure. The communication overhead and delay to cope with the dynamic environment of a large-scale industrial network are also very high for an I/O device. In this paper, we therefore propose a Distributed Management scheme for Hybrid networks to provide Real-time communication (D-MHR) based on the IEEE 802.15.4e and Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standards, which can address the requirements of energy constrained I/O devices. In D-MHR, the routers can dynamically reserve communication resources and manage the I/O devices in the local star sub-networks. We demonstrate that D-MHR achieves higher network management efficiency compared to IS100.11a standard, without compromising the latency and reliability requirements of industrial wireless networks

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

MAC Protocols for Industrial Delay-Sensitive Applications in Industry 4.0: Exploring Challenges, Protocols, and Requirements

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is expected to enable Industry 4.0 through the extensive deployment of low-power devices. However, industrial applications require, most of the time, high reliability close to 100% and low end-to-end delays. This corresponds to very challenging objectives in wireless (lossy) environments. This delay can be disastrous in time-sensitive industrial IoT deployments where immediate detection and actions impact security, safety, and machine failures. With an efficient MAC protocol, data will be provided quickly to enable the IoT to be fully effective for mission-critical applications. Efficient medium sharing is even more difficult in IIoT due to ultra-low latency, high reliability, and high quality of service (QoS) compared to best-effort for IoT. This article does not survey all existing MAC protocols for IoTs, which was already done in other works. The goal of this paper is to analyze existing MAC protocols that are more suitable for IIoT

A Case for Time Slotted Channel Hopping for ICN in the IoT

Recent proposals to simplify the operation of the IoT include the use of Information Centric Networking (ICN) paradigms. While this is promising, several challenges remain. In this paper, our core contributions (a) leverage ICN communication patterns to dynamically optimize the use of TSCH (Time Slotted Channel Hopping), a wireless link layer technology increasingly popular in the IoT, and (b) make IoT-style routing adaptive to names, resources, and traffic patterns throughout the network--both without cross-layering. Through a series of experiments on the FIT IoT-LAB interconnecting typical IoT hardware, we find that our approach is fully robust against wireless interference, and almost halves the energy consumed for transmission when compared to CSMA. Most importantly, our adaptive scheduling prevents the time-slotted MAC layer from sacrificing throughput and delay