When Scavengers Meet Industrial Wireless

Recent standardization efforts on industrial low-power wireless communication technologies clearly bet for the Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) medium access control (MAC) layer as it proved to achieve 99.999% reliability while ensuring deterministic behavior. Standards such as WirelessHART, ISA100.11a, and IEEE802.15.4e rooted at the TSCH MAC layer are used to connect millions of industrial devices today, enabling the emergence of the Industrial Internet paradigm. At that point and due to the ultralow energy profile of TSCH networks, scavengers come into play, enabling autonomously powered control and monitoring systems on industries. However, putting these systems together requires a clear understanding of their behavior. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology and a model to reliably dimension scavenger properties to network requirements and application needs, allowing industries to optimize the adoption of that technologies while keeping technical risks low.