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. This 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. This paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs.

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A Critical Analysis of Research Potential, Challenges, and Future Directives in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

We consider secure resource allocations for orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) two-way relay wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The joint problem of subcarrier (SC) assignment, SC pairing and power allocations, is formulated under scenarios of using and not using cooperative jamming (CJ) to maximize the secrecy sum rate subject to limited power budget at the relay station (RS) and orthogonal SC allocation policies. The optimization problems are shown to be mixed integer programming and nonconvex. For the scenario without CJ, we propose an asymptotically optimal algorithm based on the dual decomposition method and a suboptimal algorithm with lower complexity. For the scenario with CJ, the resulting optimization problem is nonconvex, and we propose a heuristic algorithm based on alternating optimization. Finally, the proposed schemes are evaluated by simulations and compared with the existing schemes.

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Secure Resource Allocation for OFDMA Two-Way Relay Wireless Sensor Networks Without and With Cooperative Jamming

Smart city is able to make the city source and infrastructure more efficiently utilized, which improves the quality of life for citizens. In this framework, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) play an important role to collect, process, and analyze the corresponding information. However, the massive deployment of WSNs consumes a significant energy consumption, which has raised the growing demand for green WSNs for smart cities. Exploiting the recent advance in collaborative energy and information transfer to power the WSNs and transmit the data has been considered a promising approach to realize the green WSNs for smart cities. We propose an architecture design of the green WSNs for smart cities, by exploiting the collaborative energy and information transfer protocol, and illustrate the challenging issues in this design. To achieve a green system design, the sensor nodes in WSNs harvest the energy simultaneously with the information decoding (ID) from the received radio frequency signals. Specifically, the energy-constrained sensor nodes partition the received signals into two independent groups to perform energy harvesting (EH) and ID. The sensor nodes then use the harvested energy to amplify and forward the information signals. We study the joint optimization of subcarrier grouping, subcarrier pairing, and power allocation such that the transmission rate performance is maximized with the EH constraint. The joint optimization problem is solved via dual decomposition after transforming it into an equivalent convex optimization problem. Simulation results tested with the real WSNs system data indicate that the performance of our proposed protocol can be significantly improved.

Collaborative Energy and Information Transfer in Green Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Cities

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are gaining popularity as a flexible and economical alternative to field-bus installations for monitoring and control applications. For mission-critical applications, communication networks must provide end-to-end reliability guarantees, posing substantial challenges for WSN. Reliability can be improved by redundancy, and is often addressed on the MAC layer by resubmission of lost packets, usually applying slotted scheduling. Recently, researchers have proposed a strategy to optimally improve the reliability of a given schedule by repeating the most rewarding slots in a schedule incrementally until a deadline. This Incrementer can be used with most scheduling algorithms but has scalability issues which narrows its usability to offline calculations of schedules, for networks that are rather static. In this paper, we introduce SchedEx, a generic heuristic scheduling algorithm extension, which guarantees a user-defined end-to-end reliability. SchedEx produces competitive schedules to the existing approach, and it does that consistently more than an order of magnitude faster. The harsher the end-to-end reliability demand of the network, the better the SchedEx performs compared to the Incrementer. We further show that SchedEx has a more evenly distributed improvement impact on the scheduling algorithms, whereas the Incrementer favors schedules created by certain scheduling algorithms.

End-to-End Reliability-Aware Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are characterized by integrating cybernetic and physical processes. The theories and applications of CPS face the enormous challenges. The aim of this paper is to provide a latest understanding of this emerging multi-disciplinary methodology. First, the features of CPS are described, and the research progresses are summarized from different components in CPS, such as system modeling, information acquisition, communication, control and security. Each part is also followed by the future directions. Then some typical applications are given to show the prospects of CPS.

A comprehensive overview of cyber-physical systems: from perspective of feedback system

Strict reliability and delay requirements of factory monitoring and control applications pose challenges for wireless communications in dynamic and cluttered industrial environments. To reduce outage in such fading-rich areas, cooperative relays can be used to overhear source-destination transmissions and forward data packets that a source fails to deliver. This paper presents the results of an experimental study of selective cooperative relaying protocols that are implemented in off-the-shelf IEEE 802.15.4-compatible devices and evaluated in an industrial production plant. Three practical relay update schemes, which define when a new relay selection is triggered, are investigated: 1) periodic; 2) adaptive; and 3) reactive relay selections. The results show that all relaying protocols outperform conventional time diversity retransmissions in delivery ratio and number of retransmissions for packet delivery. Reactive selection provides the best overall delivery ratio of nearly 99% over the tested network. There is a tradeoff, however, between achievable delivery ratio and required selection overhead. This tradeoff depends on protocol and network parameters, and is studied via protocol emulation using empirical channel values.

An Experimental Study of Selective Cooperative Relaying in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Cooperative relaying is a communication technique in wireless networks where neighboring nodes assist communication pairs to mitigate the negative effects of multi-path fading. The resulting performance strongly depends on the selected relays. Although a cooperative relay provides benefits to a given source-destination pair, overall network performance might be degraded due to the increased level of interference. So far almost all relay selection mechanisms consider mainly channel conditions to the potential relays. In this paper we propose a contention-based relay selection mechanism that can take into account also spatial efficiency of potential relays. For that the degree as well as relative position of the nodes are used for selection. With the proposed method a high successful relay selection probability can be achieved, while significantly reducing the amount of additional spatial resources blocked by the cooperative relay.

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Selecting a Spatially Efficient Cooperative Relay

An important building block in cooperative diversity is relay selection, which has to ensure that a well-suited node is employed as a relay. The required coordination among nodes causes signaling overhead, which in turn can significantly devalue the performance benefits gained by cooperative diversity. A relay update policy defines when a new relay is selected; it can balance the tradeoff between performance and overhead. This tradeoff is studied using mathematical methods. We consider three relay selection schemes, i.e., permanent, reactive, and adaptive, which have different relay update rules. We develop an analytical framework using semi-Markov processes to evaluate the throughput and energy efficiency of cooperative automatic repeat request (ARQ) protocols in time-correlated multipath fading channels. Results reveal potential performance gains of different selection schemes under various conditions. The reactive and adaptive schemes make use of better suited relays due to frequent selections. If their selection overhead, however, is significant, a permanent relay can achieve higher throughput due to negligible overhead. The impact of temporal correlation of fading channels on throughput and energy efficiency is also shown. These insights can be applied for development of cooperative communication protocols.

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Cooperative ARQ With Relay Selection: An Analytical Framework Using Semi-Markov Processes

The concept of cooperative relaying promises gains in robustness and energy efficiency in wireless networks. This survey gives an introduction and overview of promising methods that can be used for cooperative relaying: relay selection protocols, cooperative channel and network coding, and physical layer aspects such as cooperative modulation. The particular methods can be seen as building blocks that can be configured and optionally used for designing a system. They offer a large number of design options for relaying systems. Based on available hardware features, expected environment, and required services an efficient system needs to be tailored using the right subset of available methods.

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Building Blocks of Cooperative Relaying in Wireless Systems

Real-time wireless networked control of an Autonomous Guided Vehicle (AGV) from an edge cloud controller is an attractive approach to reduce hardware costs of AGVs, e.g., for industrial applications. We specify a networked control protocol for AGV and investigate how system performance and stability are affected by the reliability of the wireless link with fading. Particularly, there is a trade-off between the AGV speed, the control stability, and the channel quality. Our model takes into account end-to-end latency, which includes control loops and communication. Considering the model complexity, we employ a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach in order to find the optimal speed of AGV to complete a mission path in shortest time. The proposed solution achieves system stability at par with widely used baseline state-of-the-art controllers, while reducing the AGV mission time by more than 30%.

Nikolaj Marchenko

Papers

An Experimental Study of Selective Cooperative Relaying in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Selecting a Spatially Efficient Cooperative Relay

Cooperative ARQ With Relay Selection: An Analytical Framework Using Semi-Markov Processes

Building Blocks of Cooperative Relaying in Wireless Systems

Wireless Control of Autonomous Guided Vehicle Using Reinforcement Learning