Industrial IoT Monitoring: Technologies and Architecture Proposal

Abstract

Dependability and standardization are essential to the adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in industrial applications. Standards such as ZigBee, WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and WIA-PA are, nowadays, at the basis of the main process-automation technologies. However, despite the success of these standards, management of WSNs is still an open topic, which clearly is an obstacle to dependability. Existing diagnostic tools are mostly application- or problem-specific, and do not support standard-based multi-network monitoring. This paper proposes a WSN monitoring architecture for process-automation technologies that addresses the mentioned limitations. Specifically, the architecture has low impact on sensor node resources, uses network metrics already available in industrial standards, and takes advantage of widely used management standards to share the monitoring information. The proposed architecture was validated through prototyping, and the obtained performance results are presented and discussed in the final part of the paper. In addition to proposing a monitoring architecture, the paper provides an in-depth insight into metrics, techniques, management protocols, and standards applicable to industrial WSNs.

Transformative Sustainable Business Models in the Light of the Digital Imperative—A Global Business Economics Perspective

“…The development of sensors allows for a broad, cost-efficient capture of data [26,89]. By 2020, some 50 billion smart devices will be connected; together with billions of smart sensors, this will create a global supply of data that is expected to at least double every two years [90].…”

In-Band Network Telemetry in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Regardless of the technology, any of the centralized management tasks requires collecting and analyzing measurement data, often in real-time, through a process called network telemetry. These measurement data can typically be node or network state information such as health/failure reports, link/neighbor statistics, network topology and node/link occupancy [14]. Based on this data, the Network Management Entity (NME) can perform a wide range of management operations, including anomaly detection, traffic engineering (schedules, routes), network optimization, service verification.…”

“…Firstly, there are active health monitoring systems, in which the sensor nodes are actively sending local status resulting in undesired extra monitoring traffic [7], [19]. For instance, in WirelessHart, the network management fully relies on periodical or event-driven information or alarm reports from field devices to Network Manager [14]. In contrast to these active solutions, there are also passive network diagnosis and tomography techniques, which aim to minimize interference and simplify debugging of sensor networks [8], [10], [20], [21].…”

Building Wireless Control Applications with XBee and LabVIEW

“…There have also been some works in the field of Industrial IoT. For example, in [27] a monitoring architecture for process automation technologies with low impact on the sensor nodes aimed at industrial set ups was proposed.…”