Design and Deployment Experiences of a Versatile Industrial WSN and Testbed

In industry 4.0 many industrial processes are enhanced by using the information continuously collected through connected sensors. While many use cases have been discussed and simulated, the transfer into real-world deployments and the discussion of associated challenges have been rather sparse.In this field report, we present our experiences on developing and deploying a versatile Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) for the monitoring of temperature, particle concentration, CO2 concentration and other important environmental data. The WSN is accompanied by its backend and testbed infrastructure, which allows the continuous management and monitoring of the deployments. We describe the challenges faced and experiences gained during the deployment of 70 nodes at five different industrial scenarios and recap the lessons we learned.