GENSEN: Generic Sensor Network Architecture for Wireless Automation

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Generic Sensor Network Architecture for Wireless Automation is a Finnish project funded by participating companies and by Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes). Project duration is 19 months from mid 2009 until the end of 2010. The project consortium is formed by two universities, one university of applied sciences and seven companies.

During the last decade, several wireless sensor platforms capable to use commercial sensors have been developed for wireless monitoring and automation. However, the field of wireless automation applications is still immature, and there are no complete generic solutions widely available. Many applied wireless solutions have been developed just for cable replacement. They measure and transmit data without any processing or any system adaptivity. These kind of “dummy” wireless sensor networks usually run into troubles with limited transmission capacity and limited energy resources if they are applied to wireless automation, where the application might also pose such requirements for the sensor networking platform that time-consuming application-specific tailoring and configurations would be needed. Many of the developed network architectures have been small with just a couple of nodes manually placed in a single-hop star topology. They are unfeasible for big automation systems, because they neither scale up with the number of nodes nor adapt to the changes in the network topology. Compatibility with the rest of the automation system is also forgotten such that many of the wireless automation application prototypes have became stand alone systems instead of integrating to the rest of the automation system. This situation is getting somewhat better with the new standards for wireless automation, namely WirelessHART and ISA100.11a, which, for example, support interoperability with the existing automation fieldbus systems. Nevertheless, the cycle times considered, for instance, in WirelessHART do not satisfy all the needs of wireless automation systems.

In general, the most expensive and time-consuming phase in the product development is the process to develop a platform up to such a level that allows a fast production of different applications on top of the platform. In this project we focus to this task, and develop generic sensor network architecture for wireless automation. Our solution will fill the existing gaps between the current wireless sensor networking platforms and the various needs of different applications of wireless automation. The developed platform enables automatic network configuration and data processing in the network. It supports complex, multi-hop network structures and scales up to hundreds of sensor nodes. It supports the Contiki operating system, which enables compatibility with the other parts of typical automation system (other embedded systems) as well as IP-based networking with IPv4 or IPv6 support. Further, the platform supports multiple radios, high-speed real-time applications and ease of configuration. One of the core enablers of the platform is the TSMP-Lite protocol stack that will be implemented in the GENSEN project. TSMP (Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol) is the base of WirelessHART standard as well, but we will implement a more suitable version of it for high-speed wireless automation applications.

We will validate and evaluate our system by building five application networks on top of our generic sensor network architecture. The applications will be build in the areas of crane system automation, greenhouse automation, agrotechnology, wind turbine generator automation and the monitoring and control of autonomous energy production system. Built applications will give us directions to develop them further to commercial products. Moreover, by producing the test cases we can also evaluate how the concept to rapidly produce applications by using the developed generic sensor network concept can be commercialized. The GENSEN project will take advantage of the research groups’ numerous international partners, who will also be able to use the developed platform and hence benefit from the results obtained.