A MAC Protocol For Harsh Industrial IoT Applications

Abstract

Heavy industries such as mining, constructions and transportation manufacturing are currently facing many dilemmas due to the critical and harsh conditions that they collide with during their operations. Such environments faces many challenges in managing the wireless communication due to the heavy equipment, large machine and wide areas that might cause failures in such systems. Thus, there is a great need for solutions to overcome those critical issues. We introduce single channel-MoT (SC-MoT) Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol that runs on top of LoRa physical layer. The protocol adapts the multiple channel protocol MoT for industrial applications enabling ease of implementation and lower cost and delay. SC-MoT uses LoRa modulation to offer an extended range of communication with high sensitivity and low noise. Similar to MoT, SC-MoT uses the centralized scheduling technique to achieve collision-free transmissions with low delays and long power source lifetime. In addition, features such as broadcasting and rapid acknowledging are also implemented in SC-MoT. We evaluate SC-MoT against MoT with respect to waiting times, energy consumption and cost. We also show results from field experiments in a harsh Industrial environment.