Smart manufacturing is a vision and major driver for change in today’s industry. The goal of smart manufacturing is to optimize manufacturing processes through constantly monitoring, controlling, and adapting processes towards more efficient and personalised manufacturing. This requires and relies on technologies for connected machines incorporating a variety of computation, sensing, actuation, and machine to machine communications modalities. As such, understanding the change towards smart manufacturing requires knowledge of the enabling technologies, their applications in real world scenarios and the communication protocols and their performance to meet application requirements. Particularly, wireless communication is becoming an integral part of modern smart manufacturing and is expected to play an important role in achieving the goals of smart manufacturing. This paper presents an extensive review of wireless communication protocols currently applied in manufacturing environments and provides a comprehensive review of the associated use cases whilst defining their expected impact on the future of smart manufacturing. Based on the review, we point out a number of open challenges and directions for future research in wireless communication technologies for smart manufacturing.

In the past 10 years, wireless sensor networks have grown from a theoretical concept to a burgeoning modern technology. In this paper, we present a comparative review of several wireless sensor network motes. We analyze these WSN devices under a number of different parameters and criteria, including processing ability, expected lifetime and measurement capabilities. We compare and contrast the selected WSN motes under these different headings, highlighting the individual mote's performance under each category.