REACT: an Agile Control Plane for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

IEEE 802.15.4-based wireless sensor-actuator networks have been widely adopted by process industries in recent years because of their significant role in improving industrial efficiency and reducing operating costs. Today, industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks are becoming tremendously larger and more complex than before. However, a large, complex mesh network is hard to manage and inelastic to change once the network is deployed. In addition, flooding-based time synchronization and information dissemination introduce significant communication overhead to the network. More importantly, the deliveries of urgent and critical information such as emergency alarms suffer long delays, because those messages must go through the hop-by-hop transport. A promising solution to overcome those limitations is to enable the direct messaging from a long-range radio to an IEEE 802.15.4 radio. Then messages can be delivered to all field devices in a single-hop fashion. This article presents our study on enabling the cross-technology communication from LoRa to ZigBee using the energy emission of the LoRa radio as the carrier to deliver information. Experimental results show that our cross-technology communication approach provides reliable communication from LoRa to ZigBee with the throughput of up to 576.80 bps and the bit error rate of up to 5.23% in the 2.4 GHz band.

Download Full-text

Optimizations for Energy Efficiency in Software-Defined Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensors ◽

10.3390/s20174779 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 20 (17) ◽

pp. 4779

Author(s):

Sorin Buzura ◽

Bogdan Iancu ◽

Vasile Dadarlat ◽

Adrian Peculea ◽

Emil Cebuc

Keyword(s):

Energy Efficiency ◽

Network Performance ◽

Wireless Sensor ◽

Management Approach ◽

Control Plane ◽

Data Broadcast ◽

Data Packets ◽

Similar Work ◽

And Performance ◽

The Individual

Software-defined wireless sensor networking (SDWSN) is an emerging networking architecture which is envisioned to become the main enabler for the internet of things (IoT). In this architecture, the sensors plane is managed by a control plane. With this separation, the network management is facilitated, and performance is improved in dynamic environments. One of the main issues a sensor environment is facing is the limited lifetime of network devices influenced by high levels of energy consumption. The current work proposes a system design which aims to improve the energy efficiency in an SDWSN by combining the concepts of content awareness and adaptive data broadcast. The purpose is to increase the sensors’ lifespan by reducing the number of generated data packets in the resource-constrained sensors plane of the network. The system has a distributed management approach, with content awareness being implemented at the individual programmable sensor level and the adaptive data broadcast being performed in the control plane. Several simulations were run on historical weather and the results show a significant decrease in network traffic. Compared to similar work in this area which focuses on improving energy efficiency with complex algorithms for routing, clustering, or caching, the current proposal employs simple computing procedures on each network device with a high impact on the overall network performance.

Download Full-text