A wireless cloud network platform for critical data publishing in industrial process automation

Future industrial process automation systems will be underpinned by wireless communication technology. The use of wireless networks in industrial applications cannot be viewed simply as a cable replacement mechanism: instead, it has the potential to enhance the functionality of the entire system by exploiting the complexity of the network topology and the massively-interacting communication paradigm. In this paper we develop a wireless cloud platform that efficiently exploits intelligence at field device side to handle critical conditions that require fast transfer of data under stringent reliability and latency constraints. The cloud system acts as a self-contained network and it is designed to interact with devices supporting the Time Synchronized Channel Hopping protocol (TSCH) such as the commercial WirelessHART systems (IEC 62591 standard). The cloud platform handles the delivery of critical data by acting as a "hardware as a service" (HaaS) provider and implementing a cooperative-multihop forwarding scheme. Experimental activities are presented to show the feasibility of the approach in a real industrial plant. System validation shows substantial improvements compared with standard industrial solutions, both in terms of observed throughput (for high data transfer applications) and latency (for delay-sensitive data publishing services).