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Exploitation of wireless communications in various automation applications brings indisputable benefits, which has proliferated research efforts in the field during the recent years. However, underlying wireless communication systems introduce problems to the wireless control systems, such as variable delays, information loss, and limited throughput. By using multiple frequency bands simultaneously, the performance of a wireless network can be enhanced. Since many control applications have strict requirements on delay and delay variations, it is important to understand the impact of communication systems on the performance of wireless automation systems with respect to delay. Hence, in this paper, we study how different communication parameters, such as packet arrival rate, number of channels, and packet size, affect the performance of control systems. We also derive bound on control system performance given the network properties. Our results show the tradeoff between the performance of the wireless multichannel communication system and the automation system. These results can, for example, be further exploited in system design to find out the maximum packet arrival rate with given control parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the introduction of IEEE 802.11 power save mode (PSM), a lot of work has been done to enhance the energy saving ability of the wireless nodes. The ultimate goal of the research is to make the networking equipment carbon neutral and prolong the lifetime of the energy limited device for various applications; in some cases it is a trade-off between energy efficiency and delay. However, few studies have been made until now in the area of IEEE 802.11s based link specific power mode. The essence of this method is the ability of a node to maintain different power modes with its different peer nodes at the same time. A new peer service period (PSP) mechanism is also proposed in IEEE 802.11s amendment for transmitting to a receiver operating in PSM. In this paper the performance of the link specific power mode is studied for a single- and a multilink network in terms of energy, delay throughput, and sleep duration. It is found that at small load the energy saving could be as high as eighty percent when compared with the active mode operation. A stochastic model, based on discrete time discrete state Markov chain, is developed for one peer link operation to study the system behavior closely during PSM operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Structural health monitoring aims to provide an accurate diagnosis of the condition of civil infrastructures during their life span using data acquired by sensors. Wireless sensor networks represent a suitable monitoring technology to collect reliable information about the structure's condition, replacing visual inspections, and reducing installation and maintenance time and costs. This article introduces a time synchronized and configurable wireless sensor network for structural health monitoring enabling a highly accurate identification of the modal properties of the monitored structure. The wireless sensor nodes forming the network are equipped with a 3-axis digital accelerometer and a temperature and humidity sensor. The implemented Medium Access Control layer time synchronization protocol (μ-Sync) ensures a highly accurate synchronicity among the samples collected by the nodes, the absolute error being constantly below 10 μs, also when high sampling frequency (up to 1 kHz) and extended sampling periods (up to 10 minutes) are applied. The experimental results obtained on a wooden model bridge, compared with those derived from acceleration signals acquired by high-quality wired sensors, show that the so synchronized wireless sensor nodes allow a precise identification of the natural frequencies of vibration of the monitored structure (1% maximum relative difference). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interference is disruptive to the operation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in unlicensed bands as wireless systems proliferate on the spectrum. The design of a spectrum sharing scheme for WSNs to enable coexistence with geographically collocated heterogeneous wireless systems having multiple parallel interfering channels is a persistent challenge. In this context, interference identification and channel ranking in terms of spectrum access opportunities are addressed in this paper. The goal is to develop a low complexity channel ranking algorithm from channel energy measurements at sensors when a packet-reception-ratio to signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (PRR-SINR) interference model is unavailable at network initialization phase. The interference characterizing estimators, temporal occupancy and strength level of a channel, are proposed for interference identification. The effectiveness of the estimators is tested on a sensor platform at 2.4 GHz ISM band under interference from WLAN. Subsequently, the impact of the interference estimators on a channel quality from a receiver perspective is determined with a decision theoretic approach. The estimators are weighted according to their influence on the fitness of a channel and channel ranking is established. The proposed channel ranking achieves a significant gain over heuristic channel ranking (HCR) and gives an accurate interference profile of the channels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]