PhyNetLab: Architecture Design of Ultra-Low Power Wireless Sensor Network Testbed

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.