Projekt

As wireless technologies become a general trend for industrial communications, the emerging wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been identified as an attractive solution for industrial factory automation. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of battery-operated and resource-constrained sensor nodes that are wireless connected to perform collaborative sensing tasks. IEEE 802.15.4 is a standard designed for low-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) and is being used as base protocols to define more complex communication standards for industrial applications. Recent active examples include ZigBee, WirelessHART and ISA SP-100. One of the most attractive features in the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is its low-power operation, which is generally required by most WSN applications. Except for energy-efficiency, the requirements of bounded low-latency and high reliability are especially emphasized for sensor applications in the context of factory automation.
This project is carried out in collaboration with and sponsored by Siemens AG, Industry Automation Division. The motivation of joint research is to combine academic study with realistic industrial scenarios and requirements. The primary research goal focuses on performance evaluation of 802.15.4-based WSNs for industrial factory automation. The following specific questions are expected to be answered:
What is the general performance (energy consumption, delay, throughout, etc.) of the standard IEEE 802.15.4 protocols considering various traffic conditions and protocol parameter settings? What are the limitations of the standard protocols that restrict their real-time capabilities? How to improve? How will the security algorithms defined in the standard affect the network performance? What is the general performance (energy consumption, delay, throughout, etc.) of the standard IEEE 802.15.4 protocols considering various traffic conditions and protocol parameter settings? Which degree of performance degradation is to be expected when the network operates in real industrial environments with complex radio propagation channel and interference? How can we evaluate such degradation by improving the physical layer/wireless channel models?
With respect to our research methodologies, we mainly utilize discrete-event simulation techniques to evaluate statistical performance and deploy analytical methods for deterministic performance analysis as well. A detailed simulation model of the 802.15.4 protocols will be built according to the latest standard version as well as for our proposed improvements. A battery model will be developed to support simulations of energy consumption. To study more complex physical channel behavior, two modeling tasks are planned. First, a statistical radio propagation model will be built with the help of a planning tool that supports simulation and measurement of radio signal strength and reception quality in a modeled or a real environment. Secondly, the physical layer/channel models will be improved to allow general-purpose interference studies at 2.4 GHz band, e.g. WPAN and WLAN.