MR-MC Manufacturing Sensor Network Based on Nested Cellular Topology

In this paper, a MR-MC (Multi-Radio and Multi-Channel) network architecture based on nested cellular topology structure has been proposed on account of the characteristics of sensor network and manufacturing environment. Sensor nodes adopt single radio to communicate within subnet formed by the router chosen according to the strength of wireless signal received from it. The neighboring subnets use different channels to communicate within them, while the far away subnets reuse wireless channels to improve their utilization ratio and enhance the network capability. While the communication between subnets and coordinator is transmitted by routers. The routers use another radio and channel to communicate with each other and coordinator, if the network scale is large enough, that can be accomplished by different radios. In order to evaluate the validity of the proposed manufacturing sensor network structure, an experimental model based on OPNET has been developed and a set of experiments has been implemented. The experimental results show that the MAC delay, MAC access delay and end-to-end delay have been reduced, meanwhile the network throughput has been increased greatly, which shows that the proposed network architecture has good real-time performance and high reliability.