LPED: Channel diagnostics in WSN through channel coding and symbol error statistics

Abstract

Three major obstacles to wireless communication are electromagnetic interference, multipath fading and signal attenuation. The former stems mainly from collocated wireless systems operating in the same frequency band, while the latter two originate from physical properties of the environment. Identifying the source of packet corruption and loss is crucial, since the adequate countermeasures for different types of threats are essentially different. This problem is especially pronounced in industrial monitoring and control applications, where IEEE 802.15.4 communication is expected to deliver data within tight deadlines, with minimal packet loss. This work presents the Lightweight Packet Error Discriminator (LPED) that distinguishes between errors caused by multipath fading and attenuation, and those inflicted by IEEE 802.11 interference. LPED uses Forward Error Correction to determine the symbol error positions inside erroneously received packets and calculates the error density, which is then fed to a discriminator for error source classification. The statistical constituents of LPED are obtained from an extensive measurement campaign in two different types of industrial environments. The classifier incurs no overhead and in ≥90% of cases a single packet is sufficient for a correct channel diagnosis. Experiments show that LPED accelerates link diagnostics by at least 190%, compared to the relevant state-of-the-art approaches.

Towards Factory Schedule based Adaptation for Reliable Networking in Industrial IoT

“…The available literature on IDI can be divided into two broad categories based on the data used for IDI. They are: 1) Bit Error Pattern (BEP) based [1], [2], [18]; and 2) Received Signal Features based [3]- [8].…”

Measurement‐based wireless network planning, monitoring, and reconfiguration solution for robust radio communications in indoor factories

“…Through live tests in a mineral processing factory, the proposed lightweight packet error discriminator (LPED) was demonstrated to enable quick recovery from link outage [12]. Forward error correction is used in [13] to determine the error pattern in corrupted packets. This contributes to shorter detection time and boosts the reliability.…”

Channel Diagnostics for Wireless Sensor Networks in Harsh Industrial Environments

“…This work presents the Lightweight Packet Error Discriminator (LPED), a link state inference tool based on the concept initially outlined in [6]. The design goal of LPED is to identify the source of error from a single corrupted packet, in order to accelerate channel diagnostics and approach the expectations of mission-critical applications.…”

“…The original work from [6] has been further developed in this article in three aspects. Firstly, the boost in classification accuracy of up to 10%, with respect to the original version, was achieved by analyzing common patterns in wrongly classified packets and proper modification of the algorithm.…”

“…Firstly, the boost in classification accuracy of up to 10%, with respect to the original version, was achieved by analyzing common patterns in wrongly classified packets and proper modification of the algorithm. Secondly, while error traces from [6] were used to define the algorithm, a new set of error traces was collected at another industrial facility solely for the purpose of verifying the algorithm validity across different environments. Finally, the algorithm was implemented on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) devices and evaluated in terms of execution time and reactivity in a simple use-case scenario.…”