In today's competitive industry marketplace, the companies face growing demands to improve process efficiencies, comply with environmental regulations, and meet corporate financial objectives. Given the increasing age of many industrial systems and the dynamic industrial manufacturing market, intelligent and low-cost industrial automation systems are required to improve the productivity and efficiency of such systems. The collaborative nature of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) brings several advantages over traditional wired industrial monitoring and control systems, including self-organization, rapid deployment, flexibility, and inherent intelligent-processing capability. In this regard, IWSN plays a vital role in creating a highly reliable and self-healing industrial system that rapidly responds to real-time events with appropriate actions. In this paper, first, technical challenges and design principles are introduced in terms of hardware development, system architectures and protocols, and software development. Specifically, radio technologies, energy-harvesting techniques, and cross-layer design for IWSNs have been discussed. In addition, IWSN standards are presented for the system owners, who plan to utilize new IWSN technologies for industrial automation applications. In this paper, our aim is to provide a contemporary look at the current state of the art in IWSNs and discuss the still-open research issues in this field and, hence, to make the decision-making process more effective and direct.

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Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks: Challenges, Design Principles, and Technical Approaches

In this paper we discuss a selection of promising and interesting research areas in the design of protocols and systems for wireless industrial communications. We have selected topics that have either emerged as hot topics in the industrial communications community in the last few years (like wireless sensor networks), or which could be worthwhile research topics in the next few years (for example cooperative diversity techniques for error control, cognitive radio/opportunistic spectrum access for mitigation of external interferences).

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Recent and Emerging Topics in Wireless Industrial Communications: A Selection

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) represent a very promising solution in the field of wireless technologies for industrial applications. However, for a credible deployment of WSNs in an industrial environment, four main properties need to be fulfilled, i.e., energy efficiency, scalability, reliability, and timeliness. In this paper, we focus on IEEE 802.15.4 WSNs and show that they can suffer from a serious unreliability problem. This problem arises whenever the power management mechanism is enabled for energy efficiency, and results in a very low packet delivery ratio, also when the number of sensor nodes in the network is very low (e.g., 5). We carried out an extensive analysis-based on both simulation and experiments on a real WSN-to investigate the fundamental reasons of this problem, and we found that it is caused by the contention-based Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol used for channel access and its default parameter values. We also found that, with a more appropriate MAC parameters setting, it is possible to mitigate the problem and achieve a delivery ratio up to 100%, at least in the scenarios considered in this paper. However, this improvement in communication reliability is achieved at the cost of an increased latency, which may not be acceptable for industrial applications with stringent timing requirements. In addition, in some cases this is possible only by choosing MAC parameter values formally not allowed by the standard.

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A Comprehensive Analysis of the MAC Unreliability Problem in IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, the use of wireless sensor networks for industrial applications has rapidly increased. However, energy consumption still remains one of the main limitations of this technology. As communication typically accounts for the major power consumption, the activity of the transceiver should be minimized, in order to prolong the network lifetime. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive staggered sleep protocol (ASLEEP) for efficient power management in wireless sensor networks targeted to periodic data acquisition. This protocol dynamically adjusts the sleep schedules of nodes to match the network demands, even in time-varying operating conditions. In addition, it does not require any a priori knowledge of the network topology or traffic pattern. ASLEEP has been extensively studied with simulation. The results obtained show that, under stationary conditions, the protocol effectively reduces the energy consumption of sensor nodes (by dynamically adjusting their duty-cycle to current needs) thus increasing significantly the network lifetime. With respect to similar nonadaptive solutions, it also reduces the average message latency and may increase the delivery ratio. Under time-varying conditions, the protocol is able to adapt the duty-cycle of single nodes to the new operating conditions, while keeping a consistent sleep schedule among sensor nodes. The results presented here are also confirmed by an experimental evaluation in a real testbed.

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Extending the Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks Through Adaptive Sleep

Wireless industrial sensor networks are necessary for industrial applications, so that wireless sensor nodes sense around themselves and detect anomaly events in the harsh industrial environments. Due to the harshness, anomaly events such as adversarial intrusions may result in harmful and disastrous situations for industrial applications but it is difficult to detect them over wireless medium. Intrusion detection is an essential requirement for security, but as far as we know, there have not been such studies for wireless industrial sensor networks in the literature. The previous intrusion detection methods proposed for wireless sensor networks consider networks rather in general senses and restrict capabilities to specific attacks only. In this paper, we first study intrusion detection for wireless industrial sensor networks, through various experiments and design of a hierarchical framework. We classify and select better methodologies against various intrusions. Subsequently, we find novel results on the previous methodologies. We also propose a new hierarchical framework for intrusion detection as well as data processing. Throughout the experiments on the proposed framework, we stress the significance of one-hop clustering, which was neglected in the previous studies. Finally, we construct required logical protocols in the hierarchical framework; hierarchical intrusion detection and prevention protocols.

An Experimental Study of Hierarchical Intrusion Detection for Wireless Industrial Sensor Networks

Deployment of large population of sensors for sophisticated sensing and control in the industrial and commercial infrastructures is a challenging research area. The use of wireless sensor network (WSN) for industrial applications has attracted a great deal of interests today. Unlike the office networks, the industrial environment for wireless sensor networks are harsher due to the unpredictable variations in temperature, pressure, humidity, present of heavy equipments etc. In this paper, we present a survey of wireless sensor network for industrial applications. The interference and other issues that could be encountered in WSN are discussed and strategies to improve the link quality are described

W.N.N. Win

Papers

Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Environments