Wavelet Packet Division Multiplexing (WPDM)-Aided Industrial WSNs

Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) involve multiple groups of sensors, each group sending its observations on a particular phenomenon to a central computing platform over a multiple access channel (MAC). The central platform incorporates a decision fusion center (DFC) that arrives at global decisions regarding each set of phenomena by combining the received local sensor decisions. Owing to the diverse nature of the sensors and heterogeneous nature of the information they report, it becomes extremely challenging for the DFC to denoise the signals and arrive at multiple reliable global decisions regarding multiple phenomena. The industrial environment represents a specific indoor scenario devoid of windows and filled with different noisy electrical and measuring units. In that case, the MAC is modelled as a large-scale shadowed and slowly-faded channel corrupted with a combination of Gaussian and impulsive noise. The primary contribution of this paper is to propose a flexible, robust and highly noise-resilient multi-signal transmission framework based on Wavelet packet division multiplexing (WPDM). The local sensor observations from each group of sensors are waveform coded onto wavelet packet basis functions before reporting them over the MAC. We assume a multi-antenna DFC where the waveform-coded sensor observations can be separated by a bank of linear filters or a correlator receiver, owing to the orthogonality of the received waveforms. At the DFC we formulate and compare fusion rules for fusing received multiple sensor decisions, to arrive at reliable conclusions regarding multiple phenomena. Simulation results show that WPDM-aided wireless sensor network (WSN) for IIoT environments offer higher immunity to noise by more than 10 times over performance without WPDM in terms of probability of false detection.