Industrial wireless sensor networks and 5G connected industries

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of industrial revolutions, technology improvements, industrial processes and control requirements. Numerous researches divide communications traffic in industries into various classes. This classification depends on the underlying process, equipment and type of operation performed. The traffic in industries is categorized into four groups: safety/emergency traffic, critical control traffic, low-risk control traffic, and periodic monitoring traffic. The chapter lists these traffic types and their main attributes. It also discusses novel schemes to optimize communications within industrial processes to ensure desired time deadlines and reliability constraints. The chapter further summarizes the role of 5G technologies in ensuring the future of modern day industries. It presents a hybrid multi-channel scheme for performance and throughput enhancement of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). The scheme utilizes multiple frequency channels to increase the overall throughput of the system along with the increase in reliability. Use of multiple channels allows ultra-reliable low-latency communications in IWSNs.