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Title
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Towards an energy-efficient, responsive and reliable industrial internet of things
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Author
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Abstract
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| The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is the shift towards a world where all things are connected to the Internet. While nowadays IoT has an impact on every aspect of society, it is being applied particularly efficiently to further revolutionize the automation and control of traditional manufacturing and industrial processes, leading to the term Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). To fulfill the high-end requirements of IIoT applications, interconnecting all sensing and actuating devices was initially typically done through wiring. While the reliability advantage of wiring is obvious, it is costly and can be impractical in hard to reach locations or mobile machinery. Therefore, the transition to wireless communication seemed unavoidable and is becoming more and more ubiquitous. However, for this transition to be successful, wireless communication should show wire-like reliability in harsh industrial environments that suffer from external interference and multi-path fading effects that may easily disrupt the wireless signal. Additionally, to avoid having to frequently replace batteries in inconvenient places, the wireless devices should be able to run on limited battery capacity for years. Therefore, while required to be highly reliable, they should also exhibit low-power operations. A relatively recent wireless technique that has proven to be successful in fulfilling these requirement, is IEEE 802.15.4e Time-Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH), that combines frequency diversity with strict time-synchronization, achieving wired-like reliability of more than 99.999% while having ultra-low power consumption. In this PhD thesis, I study the TSCH Medium Access Control (MAC) layer and how it can be further improved to deploy it successfully in industrial networks. More specifically, I focus on 3 research questions related to the energy consumption, latency and reliability of TSCH networks. First, I investigate how the TSCH power consumption can be precisely characterized. Second, I aim at minimizing the communication delay of recurrent monitoring data that is typical for IIoT applications. Finally, I aim at further improving the industrial network’s overall reliability by introducing a technique to allows multiple physical (PHY) layers simultaneously in a single TSCH network. As such, each device is able to adapt its PHY layer to the link’s propagation characteristics. Additionally, a heuristic is also proposed that helps a device in making an appropriate parent and PHY selection in multi-PHY TSCH networks. In summary, this PhD thesis targets an energy-efficient, responsive and reliable TSCH network, thereby contributing to a wireless network deployment that is ready for the IIoT. |
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Language
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English
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Publication
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Antwerp
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University of Antwerp, Faculty of Sciences, Department of Computer Science
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2021
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Volume/pages
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xix, 170 p.
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Note
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Famaey, Jeroen [Supervisor]
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Latré, Steven [Supervisor]
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Full text (open access)
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