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.

A context broker is a reliable message-relaying service used to connect devices by integrating all device protocols and communication methods, and reliably transporting messages while isolating data from other application service layers and networking complexities. A highly scalable decentralized context broker stack is composed of three layers—starting with a peer-to-peer network connecting a byzantine fault-tolerant (i.e., blockchain-based) consensus protocol—and it manages the communication using a web-socket streaming protocol as interface to other applications. This paper presents such a concept for a decentralized context broker stack for intercommunication between heterogeneous materials handling systems, and deploys the stack as proof-of-concept using ROS-based robots in a logistics scenario.

Self-assembly protocols for aerospace structures development require a communication architecture that can assist in the decentralized control of those structures. The architecture presented in this article is an infrastructure-less networking framework with a self-organizing wireless communications networking protocol; this includes a communication primitive for data structure replication with consistency that acts as a shared brain between the nodes. This article also presents the applicability for such a communication architecture in space applications with a proof-of-concept implementation in ultra-low power hardware to demonstrate the feasibility. It also presents the results of the implemented communication primitives in the communication architecture.