In February Mikael Gidlund, professor at STC, together with four other researchers from Mälardalens University, Chalmers University of Technology and ABB Corporate Research was awarded for Best Paper at IEEE ICIT 2014 in Busan, South Korea.
- "It is a prestigious award so it's of course great fun to receive!" Says Mikael Gidlund, Professor at STC
At IEEE ICIT in South Korean the researchers presented a new method, "Implementation and Evaluation of Error Control Schemes in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks,” which improves the reliability of data transmission over wireless links in harsh industrial environments.
Cost reduction and increased flexibility are the principal reasons for introducing Wireless Sensor Networks into industrial control applications. Nowadays there already exist several IWSN standards which provide a low rate and a low cost wireless communication. The main drawback with existing IWSNS is that they all fail to provide any advanced error-control mechanism to improve reliability.
Illustration: The illustrations shows Packet delivery ratio (PDR) and you can see how the current system (uncoded) performs compared to the proposal. Additionally, you can see how much the proposal reduces the complexity, the new implementation has much less memory consumption.
Photo: The chip where everything is implemented on
This new method has been developed in conjunction with ABB and is already available for the industry to use. Due to the sensitive communication signal, the reliability is increased and the memory footprint is decreased.
- “The major consequences that may result from poor communication between sensors and actuators can be reduced by using this method. Signals from the nodes ensure that wrong things do not happen. It could be anything from deviations in temperature, flow, pressure and in worse case potentially cause danger to humans or interrupt production which causes large economical loss”, says Mikael.
The proposed solution incorporates Forward Error Control (FEC) Coding on the MAC layer without disrupting the packet format defined by the specifications. This will provide a smooth integration into existing specifications but also allows nodes that do not employ FEC to participate in the same network which is in existing technology impossible to achieve.
