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Aside from vast deployment cost reduction, Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks (IWSAN) introduce a new level of industrial connectivity. Wireless connection of sensors and actuators in industrial environments not only enables wireless monitoring and actuation, it also enables coordination of production stages, connecting mobile robots and autonomous transport vehicles, as well as localization and tracking of assets. All these opportunities already inspired the development of many wireless technologies in an effort to fully enable Industry 4.0. However, different technologies significantly differ in performance and capabilities, none being capable of supporting all industrial use cases. When designing a network solution, one must be aware of the capabilities and the trade-offs that prospective technologies have. This paper evaluates the technologies potentially suitable for IWSAN solutions covering an entire industrial site with limited infrastructure cost and discusses their trade-offs in an effort to provide information for choosing the most suitable technology for the use case of interest. The comparative discussion presented in this paper aims to enable engineers to choose the most suitable wireless technology for their specific IWSAN deployment.

Dependability and standardization are essential to the adoption of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) in industrial applications. Standards such as ZigBee, WirelessHART, ISA100.11a and WIA-PA are, nowadays, at the basis of the main process-automation technologies. However, despite the success of these standards, management of WSNs is still an open topic, which clearly is an obstacle to dependability. Existing diagnostic tools are mostly application- or problem-specific, and do not support standard-based multi-network monitoring. This paper proposes a WSN monitoring architecture for process-automation technologies that addresses the mentioned limitations. Specifically, the architecture has low impact on sensor node resources, uses network metrics already available in industrial standards, and takes advantage of widely used management standards to share the monitoring information. The proposed architecture was validated through prototyping, and the obtained performance results are presented and discussed in the final part of the paper. In addition to proposing a monitoring architecture, the paper provides an in-depth insight into metrics, techniques, management protocols, and standards applicable to industrial WSNs.

In industrial wireless sensors networks (IWSNs), the sensor lifetime predictability is critical for ensuring continuous system availability, cost efficiency and suitability for safety applications. When deployed in a real-world dynamic and centralised network, the sensor lifetime is highly dependent on the network topology, deployment configuration and application requirements. (In the absence of an energy-aware mechanism, there is no guarantee for the sensor lifetime). This research defines a conceptual model for enhancing the energy predictability and efficiency of IWSNs. A particularization of this model is the predictive energy-aware routing (PEAR) solution that assures network lifetime predictability through energy-aware routing, energy balancing and profiling. The PEAR solution considers the requirements and constraints of the industrial ISA100.11a communication standard and the VR950 IIoT Gateway hardware platform. The results demonstrate the PEAR ability to ensure predictable energy consumption for one or multiple network clusters. The PEAR solution is capable of intracluster energy balancing, reducing the overconsumption 10.4 times after 210 routing changes as well as intercluster energy balancing, increasing the cluster lifetime 2.3 times on average and up to 3.2 times, while reducing the average consumption by 23.6%. The PEAR solution validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the energy-aware conceptual indicating its suitability within IWSNs having real world applications and requirements.

During the planning, design, and optimization of an industrial wireless sensor network (IWSN), the proposed solutions need to be validated and evaluated. To reduce the time and expenses, highly accurate simulators can be used for these tasks. This paper presents the development and experimental validation of an ISA100.11a simulation model for industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSN). To achieve high simulation accuracy, the ISA100.11a software stack running on two types of certified devices (i.e., an all-in-one gateway and a field device) is integrated with the ns-3 simulator. The behavior of IWSNs is analyzed in four different types of test scenarios: (1) through simulation using the proposed ISA100.11a simulation model, (2) on an experimental testbed using ISA100.11a certified devices, (3) in a Gateway-in-the-loop Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) scenario, and (4) in a Node-in-the-loop HIL scenario. Moreover, the scalability of the proposed simulation model is evaluated. Several metrics related to the timing of events and communication statistics are used to evaluate the behavior and performance of the tested IWSNs. The results analysis demonstrates the potential of the proposed model to accurately predict IWSN behavior.

Wireless sensor networks are penetrating our daily lives, and they are starting to be deployed even in an industrial environment. The research on such industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) considers more stringent requirements of robustness, reliability, and timeliness in each network layer. This Special Issue presents the recent research result on industrial wireless sensor networks. Each paper in the special issue has unique contributions in the advancements of industrial wireless sensor network research and we expect each paper to promote the relevant research and the deployment of IWSNs.

This paper presents a formal security analysis of the ISA100.11a standard protocol using the Colored Petri Net (CPN) modeling approach. Firstly, we establish a security threat model for the ISA100.11a protocol and provide a detailed description and analysis of the identified security threats. Secondly, we use the CPN tool to model the protocol formally and conduct model checking and security analysis. Finally, we analyze and discuss the results of the model checking, which demonstrate that the ISA100.11a standard protocol may have vulnerabilities when certain security threats exist, and provide some suggestions to enhance the security of the protocol. This research provides a certain level of security assurance for the ISA100.11a standard protocol and serves as a reference for similar security research on protocols.

Industrial wireless sensor networks can help improve the efficiency, reconfigurability and flexibility of future factories, and facilitate the introduction of new applications. Industrial applications are generally characterized with strict reliability and latency requirements. The capacity to meet such requirements is highly dependent on an efficient utilization of communication links. Such efficient utilization will become even more critical as the number of deployed sensors and traffic in factories increase. In this context, this paper presents a novel link scheduling scheme for industrial wireless sensor networks that uses shared links among nodes that are part of the same path or multi-hop route. The transmission of a message along a route acts as a virtual token to identify which node should use the shared links at each point in time. This study demonstrates that the proposed link scheduling scheme can significantly improve the reliability, latency and efficiency of industrial wireless sensor networks. The proposed link scheduling scheme is here applied to industrial wireless sensor networks, but it can be used in other centralized TDMA-based multi-hop wireless networks.

Current wireless technologies for industrial applications, such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, use a centralized management approach where a central network manager handles the requirements of the static network. However, such a centralized approach has several drawbacks. For example, it cannot cope with dynamicity/disturbance in large-scale networks in a real-time manner and it incurs a high communication overhead and latency for exchanging management traffic. In this paper, we therefore propose a distributed network management scheme, D-MSR. It enables the network devices to join the network, schedule their communications, establish end-to-end connections by reserving the communication resources for addressing real-time requirements, and cope with network dynamicity (e.g., node/edge failures) in a distributed manner. According to our knowledge, this is the first distributed management scheme based on IEEE 802.15.4e standard, which guides the nodes in different phases from joining until publishing their sensor data in the network. We demonstrate via simulation that D-MSR can address real-time and reliable communication as well as the high throughput requirements of industrial automation wireless networks, while also achieving higher efficiency in network management than WirelessHART, in terms of delay and overhead.

This paper proposes novel routing and topology control algorithms for industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) based on the ISA100.11a standard. The proposed algorithms not only reduces energy consumption at the node level but also reduces packet latency at the network level. Using the residual energy and packet reception rate of neighbor nodes, the source node can estimate the highest election weight. Hence, packets are conveyed by a multi-hop forwarding scheme from source nodes to the sink by the optimal path. Furthermore, energy consumption and network latency are minimized using integer linear programming. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are fully effective in terms of energy conservation and network latency for IWSNs.

Technologies evolve in a process of gradual scientific change, but the commercial application of technologies is discontinuous. Managers interested in technology evolution can integrate these contrasting ideas using a powerful theoretical framework, based on the concept of punctuated equilibrium from evolutionary biology. The framework, which enables the differentiation of the technical evolution of a technology from its market application, is used in this article to compare the two standards for wireless sensor networks (WSN) for industrial instrumentation and control: WirelessHART and ISA100.11a. The two WSN standards are the product of two different market contexts, which have selected different minimum viable technologies for evolution in their respective niches. Network security issues present some important selection criteria. Both WSN standards implement security countermeasures against localized wireless network attacks based on the application of the AES encryption standard, but some specific security threats – some local, others remotely launched – are only well-defended by the adoption of public-key cryptographic (PKC) protocols, which only ISA100.11a supports. This article concludes that the mainstream market potential of the Internet has influenced the evolution of ISA100.11a and will continue to demand that each WSN standard evolve in ways that are difficult to predict.