A distributed management scheme for supporting energy-harvested I/O devices

Current wireless technologies for industrial application, such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, are not designed to support harvester-powered input/output (I/O) devices, where energy availability varies in a non-deterministic manner. The centralized management approach of these standards makes it difficult and costly for harvester-powered I/O devices (sensor/actuators) to re-join in 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 for Hybrid networks to provide Real-time communication (D-MHR) based on the IEEE 802.15.4e and Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) standards, 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.