Towards a Safety and Energy Aware protocol for Wireless Communication

One of the newest criteria that companies have in mind when innovating their processes, is to acquire devices which have the ability to establish a wireless connection to other surrounding devices, enabling the interconnection of processes. The Internet of Things defines this capability. Elements designed for basic tasks, such as an assembly line can be enhanced by obtaining information on the particularities that single products should have. Although very useful for modern industries, this connectivity has intrinsic risks that might not be getting the attention they should. Security and safety problems, added to a high energy consumption, the need to reduce wires and the short life of sensor-batteries, will become a major problem in the days to come. This work analyses the requirements for an application layer protocol to be defined as a safe protocol, and the missing elements of modern protocols to be used on a safety environment for an industrial application. This work aims to raise awareness on the safety characteristics a system should accomplish, without neglecting energy requirements. We selected three of the most used application layer protocols, AMQP, CoAP and MQTT. Next we set the safety standards IEC-61508 and IEC-61784, including the standardized OpenSafety protocol, as baseline to analyze the requirements that a wireless protocol needs to accomplish in order to be considered Safety compliant.