A collaborative task-oriented scheduling driven routing approach for industrial IoT based on mobile devices

Wireless sensor networks have been widely used in industrial IoT contexts due to their useful support during the production monitoring and risk pre-warning. However, complicated and extremely variable industrial environments call for higher communication stability and reliability to guarantee timely transmission of monitored data. Considering mobile intelligences such as Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs), within industrial scenarios, we propose a solution based on hybrid (fixed and mobile) industrial wireless sensor networks featured with a task-oriented model. The proposal includes a heuristic modeling method adopted to assign tasks from definite orders which will be sent to the controller, and a collaborative routing algorithm exploiting the AGVs mobility on specific trajectories. Experiments have shown that, using mobility features of the AGVs, the integrated solution can promptly repair the network when a node and the relative link fail or the detected quality is low, significantly reducing the energy consumption of wireless nodes and data communication delay, thus improving the overall throughput and reliability of industrial IoT systems. (C) 2018 Published by Elsevier B.V.