Wireless connectivity in Industrial sensor and control networks: Challenges and issues in a real implementation for a smart production use-case

The addition of portable devices, modern sensors and actuators for remote control, monitoring and maintenance in an industrial environment aiming to support the Industry 4.0 characteristics and capabilities, has raised the requirements for industrial connectivity. Within this concept and depending on the usage scenarios, the advancement from a limited wired communication network, w.r.t. installation flexibility and system maintainability, to a wireless connectivity platform offering the required mobility, scalability and coverage is imperative. In this paper we implement and evaluate a wireless sensor network in a real smart production use case, by setting up a LoRaWAN network in order to provide usage feasibility for long range applications that are able to serve our fabrication environment which contains different types of sensors, tools and machinery. The implementation of the network architecture focuses on a holistic concept for the data flow between the physical layer (LoRa) and the application layer protocols serving an intelligent system architecture. Wireless connectivity features such as communication range, signal quality, data rate and network scalability have been evaluated and fine-tuned in order to find a balance for the implementation of an effective WSN that overcomes the complications caused by the interference that exists within the harsh industrial environment. Our experimental measurements show the impact of interference and reveal the trade-offs among the desired connectivity features by fine tuning the variable parameters. Also, we discuss the issues and challenges faced in this use-case scenario and how these can be overcome or improved by certain compromises.