Time Management in Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Process Control

This paper addresses the critical challenge of time management in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) applied to industrial process control. Although wireless technologies have gained ground in industrial monitoring, their adoption in control applications remains limited due to concerns around reliability and timing accuracy. The study proposes a practical, low-cost solution based on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components, leveraging the IEEE 802.15.4-2020 standard in Time Slotted Channel Hopping (TSCH) mode. A custom time management algorithm is developed and implemented on STM32 microcontrollers paired with AT86RF212B transceivers. The proposed system ensures sub-millisecond synchronization drift across nodes by dividing communication into a structured slot frame and implementing precise scheduling and enhanced beacon-based synchronization. Validation is performed through experimental setups monitored with logic analyzers, demonstrating time drift consistently below 600 microseconds. The results confirm the feasibility of using synchronized wireless nodes for real-time industrial control tasks, suggesting that further improvements in hardware precision could enable even tighter synchronization and broader applicability in fast and critical processes.