ISA100.11a: The ISA100.11a extension for supporting energy-harvested I/O devices

Abstract

Wireless standards developed for industrial applications such as ISA100.11a and WirelessHART, generally use centralized management approaches. However, such centralized approaches cannot cope with network dynamicity in real-time manner. They also incur high management overhead and latency. Consequently, the network becomes unsuitable for resource constraint devices, e.g I/O devices. The problems become exacerbated when the network scales up. ISA100.11a standard allows reduced functionality devices in the network and supports hybrid network topology. We propose an extension to ISA100.11a to better address the requirements of the energy constrained I/O devices. The proposed extension makes the management more decentralized by delegating a part of the management responsibility to the routers in the network. It also allows the I/O devices to choose their best routers according to the metric considered using local statistics and advertised routers' ranks. We show that the proposed extension can better address the realtime and reliability requirements of industrial wireless networks. It can achieve higher network management efficiency in terms of reducing the delay and overhead of I/O devices than the ISA100.11a standard.