Aswin Karthik Ramachandran Venkatapathy

A context broker is a reliable message-relaying service used to connect devices by integrating all device protocols and communication methods, and reliably transporting messages while isolating data from other application service layers and networking complexities. A highly scalable decentralized context broker stack is composed of three layers—starting with a peer-to-peer network connecting a byzantine fault-tolerant (i.e., blockchain-based) consensus protocol—and it manages the communication using a web-socket streaming protocol as interface to other applications. This paper presents such a concept for a decentralized context broker stack for intercommunication between heterogeneous materials handling systems, and deploys the stack as proof-of-concept using ROS-based robots in a logistics scenario.

Self-assembly protocols for aerospace structures development require a communication architecture that can assist in the decentralized control of those structures. The architecture presented in this article is an infrastructure-less networking framework with a self-organizing wireless communications networking protocol; this includes a communication primitive for data structure replication with consistency that acts as a shared brain between the nodes. This article also presents the applicability for such a communication architecture in space applications with a proof-of-concept implementation in ultra-low power hardware to demonstrate the feasibility. It also presents the results of the implemented communication primitives in the communication architecture.

Future warehouses will be made of modular embedded entities with communication ability and energy aware operation attached to the traditional materials handling and warehousing objects. This advancement is mainly to fulfill the flexibility and scalability needs of the emerging warehouses. However, it leads to a new layer of complexity during development and evaluation of such systems due to the multidisciplinarity in logistics, embedded systems, and wireless communications. Although each discipline provides theoretical approaches and simulations for these tasks, many issues are often discovered in a real deployment of the full system. In this paper we introduce PhyNetLab as a real scale warehouse testbed made of cyber physical objects (PhyNodes) developed for this type of application. The presented platform provides a possibility to check the industrial requirement of an IoT-based warehouse in addition to the typical wireless sensor networks tests. We describe the hardware and software components of the nodes in addition to the overall structure of the testbed. Finally, we will demonstrate the advantages of the testbed by evaluating the performance of the ETSI compliant radio channel access procedure for an IoT warehouse.

PhyNetLab is a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) test bed for conducting research on ultra-low power electronics for WSN, energy harvesting, energy-neutral devices, suitable communication protocols and software strategies focussing on implementations in the field of materials handling and warehousing. The interaction and data exchange between machines, handling systems and storage facilities is important; to facilitate communication of various physical entities a network of physical entities is required. Henceforth, the WSN test bed described here is named PhyNetLab. This article introduces PhyNetLab facility and describes its architecture design and implementation of software and hardware components, network topology, data flow within the nodes and a facilitation tool with state-of-the-art techniques to easily deploy ultra low power WSN devices. The PhyNetLab design is also intended to be a model for a WSN implementation of Industry 4.0 systems.