Decentralized Self-Organizing Networks for Poor Reconfigurability of Loom Networks

Abstract

The intelligent weaving of looms requires networking and intelligent industrial production systems that use industrial equipment with network communication and data computing, creating a “smart factory”. However, limited by the development of industrial technology, existing industrial loom equipment does not have sufficient communication or computing capabilities: communications primarily rely on bus and Ethernet communication, which is limited to wired connections; and computations primarily rely on the host computers and cloud computers that only provide weak real-time computing. Currently, the remote management system used in the loom industry can be constructed using a cloud platform, but machine-machine interconnections between the loom control terminals are ignored. To solve the problem of poor reconfigurability in loom networks that rely on cloud servers, this study analyzes the networking requirements of a loom network and uses mesh network technology to build a wireless self-organizing loom network. A mesh network can be formed with clouds, loom equipment, and other equipment. By constructing an experimental platform with a decentralized self-organizing network to build a remote loom monitoring system, an anti-destruction experiment of the developed self-organizing loom network is performed. After the self-organizing network is constructed, key nodes in the network are disconnected, and the network is automatically reconfigured to resume normal work. The reconfigurability and stability of the network are demonstrated via destructive experiments. Results show that the self-organizing network construction method developed in this study can build a loom self-organizing network, which is anti-destructive and mitigate the poor reconfigurability of existing loom networks. Compared with the wireless communication network of the previous loom remote monitoring system, the loom interconnection self-organizing network is more reliable and anti-interference, which can better meet the network demand of intelligent manufacturing for loom equipment. This study provides an effective example of loom networking technology for the industry and is important when promoting the construction of smart loom factories.