A Study on the Optimal Base Station Placement for Connected Smart Factories

As the smart factories become more and more connected, the wireless connectivity of the production and material handling machines and systems become increasingly common in many factory floors. It is hence important to question the impacts of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks in the performance of smart factories, and in particular their end-to-end reliability. One of the most challenging problems is to determine optimal positions for mounting the wireless sensor nodes for high quality signal reception. Base station placement has a significant impact on network lifetime performance for a wireless sensor network. This problem is particularly challenging in harsh factory environments due to its coupling with data routing. Thus the position and total number of base stations used affect the reliability of the sensor networks used in connecting the factory. This paper presents an approximation technique based on K-means clustering method to determine an optimal position for placing base stations, and minimum number of base stations required for a smart factory implementation. The proposed approach has been validated by simulations, which suggest that increasing the number of the base stations will enhance the communication link quality in industrial environments where there is a huge effect of fading and shadowing. This paper focuses on the problem of placement for base stations in a scale smart factory model where the wireless nodes are used for communication between a number of connected automated manufacturing and material handling equipment.