Impact of mobility on the management and performance of WirelessHART industrial communications

Abstract

Wireless communication technologies will represent an essential technological component of the Factories of the Future in order to facilitate the real-time monitoring of the industrial processes, as well as the working conditions and the workers' health and safety. To this aim, wireless sensor networking technologies are being evolved to overcome the industrial challenging propagation environments and guarantee the strict QoS requirements characterizing industrial applications. However, a major future demand for wireless industrial systems could be the capability to support mobility. In this context, this paper analyzes the impact of mobility on the performance of industrial wireless communication systems based on a centralized management like the WirelessHART standard.