2,027 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
Evolving SDN for Low-Power IoT Networks
Software Defined Networking (SDN) offers a flexible and scalable architecture
that abstracts decision making away from individual devices and provides a
programmable network platform. However, implementing a centralized SDN
architecture within the constraints of a low-power wireless network 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 addresses the
challenge of bringing high-overhead SDN architecture to IEEE 802.15.4 networks.
We explore how traditional SDN needs to evolve in order to overcome the
constraints of low-power wireless networks, and discuss protocol and
architectural optimizations necessary to reduce SDN control overhead - the main
barrier to successful implementation. We argue that interoperability with the
existing protocol stack is necessary to provide a platform for controller
discovery and coexistence with legacy networks. We consequently introduce
{\mu}SDN, a lightweight SDN framework for Contiki, with both IPv6 and
underlying routing protocol interoperability, as well as optimizing a number of
elements within the SDN architecture to reduce control overhead to practical
levels. We evaluate {\mu}SDN in terms of latency, energy, and packet delivery.
Through this evaluation we show how the cost of SDN control overhead (both
bootstrapping and management) can be reduced to a point where comparable
performance and scalability is achieved against an IEEE 802.15.4-2012 RPL-based
network. Additionally, we demonstrate {\mu}SDN through simulation: providing a
use-case where the SDN configurability can be used to provide Quality of
Service (QoS) for critical network flows experiencing interference, and we
achieve considerable reductions in delay and jitter in comparison to a scenario
without SDN
Traffic eavesdropping based scheme to deliver time-sensitive data in sensor networks
Due to the broadcast nature of wireless channels, neighbouring sensor nodes may overhear packets transmissions from each other even if they are not the intended recipients of these transmissions. This redundant packet reception leads to unnecessary expenditure of battery energy of the recipients. Particularly in highly dense sensor networks, overhearing or eavesdropping overheads can constitute a significant fraction of the total energy consumption. Since overhearing of wireless traffic is unavoidable and sometimes essential, a new distributed energy efficient scheme is proposed in this paper. This new scheme exploits the inevitable overhearing effect as an effective approach in order to collect the required information to perform energy efficient delivery for data aggregation. Based on this approach, the proposed scheme achieves moderate energy consumption and high packet delivery rate notwithstanding the occurrence of high link failure rates. The performance of the proposed scheme is experimentally investigated a testbed of TelosB motes in addition to ns-2 simulations to validate the performed experiments on large-scale network
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 Study of IEEE 802.15.4 Security Framework for Wireless Body Area Network
A Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) is a collection of low-power and
lightweight wireless sensor nodes that are used to monitor the human body
functions and the surrounding environment. It supports a number of innovative
and interesting applications, including ubiquitous healthcare and Consumer
Electronics (CE) applications. Since WBAN nodes are used to collect sensitive
(life-critical) information and may operate in hostile environments, they
require strict security mechanisms to prevent malicious interaction with the
system. In this paper, we first highlight major security requirements and
Denial of Service (DoS) attacks in WBAN at Physical, Medium Access Control
(MAC), Network, and Transport layers. Then we discuss the IEEE 802.15.4
security framework and identify the security vulnerabilities and major attacks
in the context of WBAN. Different types of attacks on the Contention Access
Period (CAP) and Contention Free Period (CFP) parts of the superframe are
analyzed and discussed. It is observed that a smart attacker can successfully
corrupt an increasing number of GTS slots in the CFP period and can
considerably affect the Quality of Service (QoS) in WBAN (since most of the
data is carried in CFP period). As we increase the number of smart attackers
the corrupted GTS slots are eventually increased, which prevents the legitimate
nodes to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. This means that the direct
adaptation of IEEE 802.15.4 security framework for WBAN is not totally secure
for certain WBAN applications. New solutions are required to integrate high
level security in WBAN.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, 2 table
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
Design and analysis of adaptive hierarchical low-power long-range networks
A new phase of evolution of Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication has started where vertical Internet of Things (IoT) deployments dedicated to a single application domain gradually change to multi-purpose IoT infrastructures that service different applications across multiple industries. New networking technologies are being deployed operating over sub-GHz frequency bands that enable multi-tenant connectivity over long distances and increase network capacity by enforcing low transmission rates to increase network capacity. Such networking technologies allow cloud-based platforms to be connected with large numbers of IoT devices deployed several kilometres from the edges of the network. Despite the rapid uptake of Long-power Wide-area Networks (LPWANs), it remains unclear how to organize the wireless sensor network in a scaleable and adaptive way. This paper introduces a hierarchical communication scheme that utilizes the new capabilities of Long-Range Wireless Sensor Networking technologies by combining them with broadly used 802.11.4-based low-range low-power technologies. The design of the hierarchical scheme is presented in detail along with the technical details on the implementation in real-world hardware platforms. A platform-agnostic software firmware is produced that is evaluated in real-world large-scale testbeds. The performance of the networking scheme is evaluated through a series of experimental scenarios that generate environments with varying channel quality, failing nodes, and mobile nodes. The performance is evaluated in terms of the overall time required to organize the network and setup a hierarchy, the energy consumption and the overall lifetime of the network, as well as the ability to adapt to channel failures. The experimental analysis indicate that the combination of long-range and short-range networking technologies can lead to scalable solutions that can service concurrently multiple applications
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