Energy-Neutral and QoS-Aware Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks for Health Monitoring of Hoisting Systems

Hoisting equipment is core to many industrial systems and, therefore, their state of health significantly affects production lines and personnel safety; this is especially important in environments such as coal mines. The health of the hoisting system can be estimated by deploying energy harvesting wireless sensor nodes that monitor the drum surface stress. In this network of sensor devices, it is very costly to send highly sampled data as it causes radio congestion and consumes energy. However, from our experience of sensing hoist systems, we note that the data observed at the upper surface of the hoist are significantly more indicative of the state of health of the whole system, compared with data sensed at the lower surface. Therefore, we need to take advantage of this to optimize the communications of sensor nodes. However, scarce energy can be collected for these devices from the hoist itself, along with the prioritized Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (throughput, delay) of monitoring signals, raises important challenges for energy management. In this article, we use Lyapunov optimization techniques and propose an energy-neutral and QoS-aware protocol (EQP), including duty cycling and network scheduling to solve it. Extensive simulations show that the EQP helps sensor nodes realize consecutive monitoring, and achieve more than 38% utility gain compared with existing strategies.