Abstract
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks.
Highlights
Present-day large-scale industrial monitoring and control systems may typically consist of thousands of sensors, controllers and actuators
WirelessHART, WIA-PA, ISA100.11a and IEEE 802.15.4e are designed for industrial process automation requirements using concepts derived from the Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP) [11]
Reliability is an integral part of any industrial monitoring and control system as any slight degradation in communication can potentially result in complete system malfunction
Summary
Present-day large-scale industrial monitoring and control systems may typically consist of thousands of sensors, controllers and actuators. In order to maximize the utilization of these distributed resources and optimize global operation, it is essential for companies to have a detailed outlook of the various operational characteristics of every single piece of equipment within every industrial plant This could possibly require both static and moving parts of a piece of machinery to be monitored. In order to optimize overall energy usage, an industrial plant might require several pieces of machinery located in different parts of the plant to change their operational characteristics This would require distributed sensing, control and subsequently actuation. Distributed mechanisms makes wireless technologies an invaluable option for developing future industrial applications that require fine-grained, flexible, robust, low-cost and low-maintenance monitoring and control.
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