Cognitive-based multi-radio prototype for industrial environment

Today, a large number of cost-saving and energy-efficient applications are enabled by wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). Usually, these solutions have serious connectivity problems in scenarios where other wireless technologies are co-located sharing the frequency spectrum (e.g., industrial shop-floors). To cope with this issue, the concept of multi-radio (MR) has been introduced, which promotes the simultaneous use of multiple radio communication interfaces, leveraging their different characteristics, to improve the overall system performance and reliability. The proposed approach based on cognitive algorithm considers two wireless technologies operating at the 2.4-GHz frequency band, namely Wi-Fi and 6LoWPAN, and provides a concrete implementation of the system using a real test-bed industry scenario. The solution provides a reliable communication infrastructure for manufacturing processes, firstly combining the properties of several physical layer standards and secondly providing the ability to recover from temporary network failures by switching from a communication channel to another one.