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 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

Katakan tidak pada rasuah

Isu atau masalah rasuah menjadi topik utama sama ada di peringkat antarabangsa mahupun di peringkat dalam negara. Pertubuhan Bangsa- bangsa Bersatu menegaskan komitmen komuniti antarabangsa bertegas untuk mencegah dan mengawal rasuah melalui buku bertajuk United Nations Convention against Corruption. Hal yang sama berlaku di Malaysia. Melalui pernyataan visi oleh mantan Perdana Menteri Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahathir bin Mohamed memberikan indikasi bahawa kerajaan Malaysia komited untuk mencapai aspirasi agar Malaysia dikenali kerana integriti dan bukannya rasuah. Justeru, tujuan penulisan bab ini adalah untuk membincangkan rasuah dari beberapa sudut termasuk perbincangan dari sudut agama Islam, faktor-faktor berlakunya gejala rasuah, dan usaha-usaha yang dijalankan di Malaysia untuk membanteras gejala rasuah. Perkara ini penting bagi mengenalpasti penjawat awam menanamkan keyakinan dalam melaksanakan tanggungjawab dengan menghindari diri daripada rasuah agar mereka sentiasa peka mengutamakan kepentingan awam

Time Segmentation Approach Allowing QoS and Energy Saving for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are conceived to monitor a certain application or physical phenomena and are supposed to function for several years without any human intervention for maintenance. Thus, the main issue in sensor networks is often to extend the lifetime of the network by reducing energy consumption. On the other hand, some applications have high priority traffic that needs to be transferred within a bounded end-to-end delay while maintaining an energy efficient behavior. We propose MaCARI, a time segmentation protocol that saves energy, improves the overall performance of the network and enables quality of service in terms of guaranteed access to the medium and end-to-end delays. This time segmentation is achieved by synchronizing the activity of nodes using a tree-based beacon propagation and allocating activity periods for each cluster of nodes. The tree-based topology is inspired from the cluster-tree proposed by the ZigBee standard. The efficiency of our protocol is proven analytically, by simulation and through real testbed measurements

H-MAC: A Hybrid MAC Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose a hybrid medium access control protocol (H-MAC) for wireless sensor networks. It is based on the IEEE 802.11's power saving mechanism (PSM) and slotted aloha, and utilizes multiple slots dynamically to improve performance. Existing MAC protocols for sensor networks reduce energy consumptions by introducing variation in an active/sleep mechanism. But they may not provide energy efficiency in varying traffic conditions as well as they did not address Quality of Service (QoS) issues. H-MAC, the propose MAC protocol maintains energy efficiency as well as QoS issues like latency, throughput, and channel utilization. Our numerical results show that H-MAC has significant improvements in QoS parameters than the existing MAC protocols for sensor networks while consuming comparable amount of energy.Comment: 10 pages, IJCNC Journal 201

A Review of Wireless Body Area Networks for Medical Applications

Recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology, integrated circuits, and wireless communication have allowed the realization of Wireless Body Area Networks (WBANs). WBANs promise unobtrusive ambulatory health monitoring for a long period of time and provide real-time updates of the patient's status to the physician. They are widely used for ubiquitous healthcare, entertainment, and military applications. This paper reviews the key aspects of WBANs for numerous applications. We present a WBAN infrastructure that provides solutions to on-demand, emergency, and normal traffic. We further discuss in-body antenna design and low-power MAC protocol for WBAN. In addition, we briefly outline some of the WBAN applications with examples. Our discussion realizes a need for new power-efficient solutions towards in-body and on-body sensor networks.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, and 3 tables. In V3, the manuscript is converted to LaTe