Design and Implementation of The Plug&Play Enabled Flexible Modular Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network Platform

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of increasing the flexibility of the contemporary wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) in regard to the design of the nodes. For this we propose the concept of a Plug&Play enabled modular WSAN node platform. According to our concept, the new WSAN nodes with desired functionalities can be built by stacking together the different hardware modules encapsulating power sources, processing units, wired and wireless transceivers, sensors and actuators, or even sets of these. Once a node is built, it automatically discovers and identifies all the connected hardware modules, obtains required software and tunes its own operation taking into account the node's structure, available resources and active applications. In this paper we first present the concept and then report the developed hardware and software architectures and the most critical mechanisms enabling implementation. Also we discuss the practical implementations and report the evaluation results for the prototyped solution. Our results show that the developed platform is much more feature and resource rich than the existing ones, which is achieved at a cost of increased consumption and size. We believe that the unique features of the proposed platform have the potential to drastically change the procedure of WSAN development, especially when it comes to experimenting and developing dynamic WSANs with a heterogeneous structure. In this respect the hardware identification and reconfiguration capabilities conceived in the platform can be utilized in full and may drastically increase the performance of WSANs, if combined with novel control and optimization schemes yet to be developed.

On LoRaWAN scalability: Empirical evaluation of susceptibility to inter-network interference

“…The tests were conducted using the modular Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN)/IoT platform developed at the Centre for Wireless Communications (CWC) of the University of Oulu ( [15], [16]). Specifically for these tests, three modules based on the RN2483 LoRaWAN transceivers 1 from Microchip were designed (the RN2483s were programmed with firmware v1.0) and built.…”

“…The landscape of the LPWAN technologies is quite diverse and is composed of the proper solutions (e.g., Sigfox, Ingenu/On-Ramp, Starfish, Cynet, Accellus, Telensa), open and semi-open technologies (e.g., LoRaWAN, Weightless), and few standards (IEEE 802. 15.4k, LTE-M and NB-IoT recently adopted in Rel. 13 document).…”

Experimental Validation of Peer-to-Peer Distributed Voltage Control System

“…The D2D communication modules are implemented based on a modular WSAN/IoT platform (wireless sensor and actuator network/Internet of Things) [36]. Each module is composed of three submodules stacked on top of each other, as shown in Figure 6.…”

D2D communications in LoRaWAN Low Power Wide Area Network: From idea to empirical validation

“…The EDs were programmed with the in-house developed firmware, composed of the FreeRTOS middleware and proprietary low-level interface drivers (refer to [20] and [23]), in-house developed RN2483 drivers supporting both operation of devices in LoRaWAN and the direct control over the radio, and the threads implementing the described D2D protocol and switching between LoRaWAN and D2D.…”