D-MHR: A distributed management scheme for hybrid networks to provide real-time industrial wireless automation

Current wireless technologies for industrial application, such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, use a centralized management approach which makes it difficult and costly for harvester-powered I/O devices to re-join the network in case of power failure. The communication overhead and delay to cope with the dynamic environment of a large-scale industrial network are also very high for an I/O device. In this paper, we therefore propose a distributed management scheme named D-MHR, which can address the requirements of energy constrained I/O devices. In D-MHR, the routers can dynamically reserve communication resources and manage the I/O devices in the local star sub-networks. We demonstrate that D-MHR achieves higher network management efficiency compared to IS100.11a standard, without compromising the latency and reliability requirements of industrial wireless networks.