Design of a lightweight control plane for supporting MAC and routing in industrial WSNs

Abstract

Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) are becoming increasingly popular and many recent papers addressed their unique technical and research challenges [1]. Analyzing the product portfolio of leading manufacturers the following IWSN standards prominently emerge: WirelessHART [2] and ISA100 Wireless [3]. In both standards low power wireless communications are based on Time Division Channel Access (TDMA) combined with frequency hopping, to guarantee determinism of channel access and to enhance resilience to interference.