Centre of Informatics and Systems of the University of Coimbra, Coimbra 3030-290, Portugal.
Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra, ISCAC, Coimbra 3040-316, Portugal.
Sensors (Basel). 2018 Oct 21;18(10):3568. doi: 10.3390/s18103568.
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.
可靠性和标准化对于无线传感器网络（WSN）在工业应用中的采用至关重要。如今，ZigBee、WirelessHART、ISA100.11a 和 WIA-PA 等标准是主要过程自动化技术的基础。然而，尽管这些标准取得了成功，WSN 的管理仍然是一个开放的话题，这显然是可靠性的障碍。现有的诊断工具大多是特定于应用程序或问题的，并且不支持基于标准的多网络监控。本文提出了一种用于过程自动化技术的 WSN 监控架构，解决了上述限制。具体来说，该架构对传感器节点资源的影响较小，使用工业标准中已经可用的网络指标，并利用广泛使用的管理标准来共享监控信息。通过原型设计验证了所提出的架构，并在本文的最后部分展示和讨论了所获得的性能结果。除了提出监控架构外，本文还深入探讨了适用于工业 WSN 的指标、技术、管理协议和标准。
