Section: Bilateral Contracts and Grants with Industry

Bilateral Contracts with Industry

OCARI2

Participants : Ichrak Amdouni, Pascale Minet, Cédric Adjih, Ridha Soua.

Partners: EDF, Inria.

The OCARI (Optimization of Ad hoc Communications in Industrial networks) project, funded by ANR, started in February 2007 and ended in 2010, EDF the coordinator decided to continue the project that deals with wireless sensor networks in an industrial environment. It aims at responding to the following requirements which are particularly important in power generation industry and in warship construction and maintenance:

• Support of deterministic MAC layer for time-constrained communication,

• Support of optimized energy consumption routing strategy in order to maximize the network lifetime,

• Support of human walking speed mobility for some particular network nodes, (e.g. sinks).

The development of OCARI targets the following industrial applications:

• Real time centralized supervision of personal dose in electrical power plants,

• Condition Based Maintenance of mechanical and electrical components in power plants as well as in warships,

• Environmental monitoring in and around power plants,

• Structure monitoring of hydroelectric dams.

To meet the requirements of supported applications (remote command of actuators, tele-diagnostic...), new solutions are brought to manage several communication modes, ranging from deterministic data transfers to delay tolerant transfers. A key issue is how to adapt routing algorithms to the industrial environment, taking into account more particularly limited network resources (e.g.; bandwidth), node mobility and hostile environment reducing radio range. The OCARI project aimed at developing a wireless sensor communication module, based on IEEE 802.15.4 PHY layer.

In 2014, Inria took part with EDF to the specification of a simplified OCARI stack for a porting to a 32 bit platform and provided support to the SME in charge of developing this stack.