POSIMNET-R: An immunologic resilient approach to position routers in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has increased the interest in employing Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) technologies in industrial automation. The advantages range from ease of installation and maintenance to reduced deployment time and infrastructure costs. However, industrial automation has critical requirements regarding network infrastructure, such as reliability and failure tolerance. Therefore, it is imperative to have an adequate placement of sensor and router nodes, to obtain a network with multiple paths, allowing the data to reach management systems within a reasonable time, even in the event of failures. The placement of router nodes has to consider latency, network lifespan, connectivity, and failure tolerance aspects in a possibly hostile environment, with classified areas and obstacles such as silos, tanks and buildings. We present a new approach, called POSIMNET-R, to place IWSN routing nodes in an industrial configuration, which circumvents forbidden areas and obstacles, based on Artificial Immunological Networks. The resulting network offers low failure rates and path redundancy criteria. The results have shown that POSIMNET-R was capable of providing a reliable network with multiple paths and resilience of the used routers equal to 81.50% in the basic case study and 73.66% in the real case scenario.