Survey and systematic mapping of industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is an infrastructure comprised of sensing, computing, and communication devices, that obtain and process data to help understand the behavior of the monitored environment, and to react to events and phenomena that occur in it. The WSN can be used in domains such as agriculture, energy, industrial automation, medical health care, smart building, and so on. In industry, the characteristics of the wireless channel are different in comparison to other WSN environments, such as home and office environments. The use of WSN in industry is subject to typical problems of wireless communications, such as noise, shadowing, multipath fading and interference. In addition, the wireless channel in many industrial environments is non-stationary for a long term, which can cause abrupt changes in the characteristics of the channel over time. A set of standards was developed for industrial WSN, to overcome these limitations, such as WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, WIA-PA, and IEEE 802.15.4e. All the mentioned standards are based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer, but define different mechanisms for the upper layers. However, according to recent publications, problems still can arise in the deployment of networks that follow the standards, because of multipath effects, and interference. This survey provides a structured overview of the standards used to implement industrial WSN, their advantages and drawbacks, and discusses the characteristics of the wireless channel in industrial environments. Finally, a systematic mapping is described, that presents results of publications about industrial WSN, and highlights important topics to be studied in this field.