On the Feasibility to Deploy Mobile Industrial Applications using Wireless Communications

Wireless communications can facilitate the deployment of novel industrial applications to improve productivity or health and safety conditions. Health and safety applications require mobile solutions capable to operate under harsh propagation conditions at low cost and energy consumption. The work in:

Javier Gozalvez, Miguel Sepulcre, Jose Antonio Palazon, "On the Feasibility to Deploy Mobile Industrial Applications using Wireless Communications", Accepted for publication in Elsevier Computers in Industry.

presents the results of an extensive measurement campaign that demonstrate the feasibility to deploy industrial mobile sensing applications with reliable wireless connectivity levels using short-range IEEE 802.15.4. The campaign also analyses the capability of various wireless technologies to provide the throughput levels necessary for wireless local data distribution and backhaul connectivity.

The field testing campaign has been conducted as part of the FASyS project (Absolutely Safe and Healthy Factory). FASyS is investigating the design of an end-to-end heterogeneous wireless solution for continuously sensing the working environment and the workers’ health and physiological conditions in order to be able to detect in advance any potential risks. This research aims to complement the existing studies with an extensive measurement campaign that, for the first time, evaluates the performance of wireless off-the-shelf devices for mobile sensing applications in industrial environments. The study is not limited to communications performance metrics, but also implements three significant safety-related industrial mobile applications. The obtained results provide important indications on the industrial wireless communications performance under mobile conditions.

The field testing campaign has been conducted in the main factory of GORATU, an important Spanish manufacturer of machine tools. Covering a surface area of more than 10.000m², the factory has a perimeter wall and a building height of around 11m. The interior of the plant mainly consists of wide corridors and large rooms typically separated by concrete walls of around 2m height. The corridors are machinery assembly areas, and typically present large metal pieces whose spatial distribution at the time of conducting the measurement campaign is shown in the following figure. The receiver nodes are placed at fixed positions (RXZ and RXW in the figure). On the other hand, the transmitter node is mobile, and moves around different areas of the factory characterized by varying operating and propagation conditions.

This website provides access to additional graphic material about the performed field testing campaign in order to provide complementary information and facilitate the understanding of the conditions under which each test was conducted. To to facilitate wireless industrial communications research activities based on the results of the conducted measurement campaing, the obtained traces are available upon request.

In order to comply with our sponsor guidelines, we would appreciate if any publication using the graphical material or traces reported in this website references the following publication:

Javier Gozalvez, Miguel Sepulcre, Jose Antonio Palazon, "On the Feasibility to Deploy Mobile Industrial Applications using Wireless Communications", Accepted for publication in Elsevier Computers in Industry.

To have access to the graphical material and traces, please email j.gozalvez@umh.es and msepulcre@umh.es. For reference purposes, we would appreciate if in your email you indicate your name, affiliation, contact address and research activity for which you are planning to use our traces. If you are a student, please also include your supervisor's name and email address. You will receive an email with further instructions to download the graphical material and traces in a few days.

Four different types of traces are available, one for each technology evaluated in the paper. The following tables detail the data available in each type of trace. The data is provided in plain text so they can be easyly read with Matlab/Octave or any other processing tool. The IEEE 802.15.4 and IEEE 802.11 traces have one row for each correctly received packet (erroneous packets are not included in these traces). The IEEE 802.16 and UMTS traces have one row every T=1s and T=200ms, respectively.

IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee traces

Column	Description
Elapsed Time	Time elapsed since the beginning of the test (in seconds)
TX Position X	TX position in the horizontal axis (in meters)
TX Position Y	TX position in the vertical axis (in meters)
TX Height	TX antenna height (in meters)
RX Position X	RX position in the horizontal axis (in meters)
RX Position Y	RX position in the vertical axis (in meters)
RX Height	RX antenna height (in meters)
TX-RX Distance	Distance between TX and RX nodes (in meters)
RSSI	Received Signal Strength Indicator (in dBm)
PER	Packet Error Rate experienced in the last T=5s
Distance to intersection	Distance to the intersection (in meters), only applicable to the collision avoidance use case
Painting booth	Boolean variable only applicable to the restricted access use case (1 indicates that the TX node is inside the painting booth)

IEEE 802.11/WiFi traces

Column	Description
Elapsed Time	Time elapsed since the beginning of the test (in seconds)
Throughput	Throughput experienced in the last T=1s (in Mbps)
Data rate	Data rate of the current packet (in Mbps)
RSSI	Received Signal Strength Indicator of the current packet (in dBm)
PER	Packet Error Rate experienced in the last T=1s

IEEE 802.16/WiMAX traces

Column	Description
Elapsed Time	Time elapsed since the beginning of the test (in seconds)
SNR	Signal to Noise Ratio experienced in the last T=1s (in dB)
RSSI	Received Signal Strength Indicator experienced in the last T=1s (in dBm)
Throughput	Throughput experienced in the last T=1s (in Mbps)

UMTS/HSDPA traces

Column	Description
Elapsed Time	Time elapsed since the beginning of the test (in seconds)
Throughput	Throughput experienced in the last T=200ms (in Mbps)
Transmission power	Transmission power used in the last T=200ms (in dBm)
SIR	Signal to Interference ratio experienced in the last T=200ms (in dB)
MAC BLER	MAC Block Error Rate experienced in the last T=200ms (in dB)
RSSI	Received Signal Strength Indicator experienced in the last T=200ms (in dBm)
Usage	Percentage of time with resources assigned in the last T=200ms

Insert the code provided by email to access the traces and graphical material: