Efficient and reliable communications in industrial wireless sensor networks

Raza, Mohsin (2018) Efficient and reliable communications in industrial wireless sensor networks. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

Communications infrastructure plays an important role in industrial monitoring, automation and process control. Recently, wireless solutions have emerged to offer communications in industrial processes to establish feedback control. Due to cost efficiency, localized processing, application specific and resource efficient design, flexibility, and self-healing abilities, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) emerge as the most promising technology for industrial automation.

Despite the seamless advantages, IWSNs still suffer from the reliability and real-time data delivery issues inherent in the wireless networks. These issues are more prominent in the emergency communications, regulatory feedback control systems and supervisory feedback control systems.

The research focuses on communications and system feedback related problems of IWSNs in applications in automation and process control industry including, emergency systems, regulatory control systems, supervisory control systems open loop control systems, alerting systems and monitoring systems. The research targets communication assurances, reliability improvement, real-time sensory data propagation and energy efficiency in IWSNs. It also targets the traffic scheduling from heterogeneous sensing nodes to improve the overall network efficiency, reliable data scheduling and deterministic schedule formation for coexisting industrial systems.

The notable contributions of the research cover following aspects of IWSNs
• A novel scheme is proposed to ensure instant channel access for emergency communications. The scheme integrates emergency communications within the regular communications channel without compromising the reliability and time sensitivity of the information. Thus, improving network flexibility along with improved reliability and real-time data delivery. The improvements proposed in the emergency communications are further extended to the regulatory control and supervisory control applications where superframe of variable durations are introduced to offer higher reliability within the communication feedback links.
• Dynamic priority system is proposed which takes in to consideration the critical parameters in industrial processes to offer suitable urgency index to the sensory data based on real-time analysis of parameters. Using the priority system, MAC layer optimizations are proposed to 1) improve the reliability of high priority nodes’ communications, 2) ensure pre-specified Packet Reception Rate (PRR) within the network.
• An efficient update mechanism is proposed to offer improved energy efficiency and network reliability in gradient-based routing protocols. Two schemes: periodic setup and multiple setup, are proposed along with secondary update mechanisms to keeps the routing path updated with minimal control overhead. Furthermore, an optimizable gradient cost function is also proposed.
• A low complexity, scheduling algorithm is proposed, which allows multiple classes of industrial systems to coexist and share same wireless resource and to distinctly schedule information from diverse industrial processes with heterogeneous time deadlines.

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