Abstract
Many industries use battery-powered asset trackers to monitor non-powered fleet assets. However, energy-intensive tasks, such as cellular communication and GPS localisation, significantly reduce battery life, leading to frequent battery replacements and increased operational costs.This paper presents a specialised application-layer protocol for industrial environments that sits above existing wireless technologies, e.g. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), Zigbee, and Wi-Fi Direct. Our protocol presents an energy-optimised communication and time-location sharing solution that (i) unifies mobile broadcast beacons with mobile sinks, (ii) eliminates runtime handshakes through the use of a pre-provisioned Device Registry, and (iii) is validated through formal security proofs.The protocol enables battery-powered devices to leverage time, location and cloud connectivity of nearby wired devices, such as telematics units on service vehicles, drones, or autonomous robots.A feasibility study for short-range communication is evaluated by analysing device density and coverage in a 25 km 2 industrial environment. Results indicate that when 20 or more mobile wired devices are available in the environment, an average of 80% of battery-powered devices are in the range of a wired device when considering a minor network delay.We have provided an open-source implementation of the protocol based on Android, utilising BLE Advertising and Generic Attribute (GATT) Profile capabilities. The prototype demonstrates orders-of-magnitude reductions in energy consumption compared to GPS and LTE in a lab environment with actual savings depending on the wireless technology, communication reliability and the required connectivity and location accuracy.