Implementation of WirelessHART in NS-2 simulator

Abstract

One of the first standards in the wireless sensor networks domain, WirelessHART, was introduced to address industrial process automation and control requirements. The standard can be used as a reference point to evaluate other wireless protocols in the domain of industrial monitoring and control. This makes it worthwhile to set up a reliable WirelessHART simulator to achieve that reference point in a relatively easy way. This paper explains our implementation of WirelessHART in the NS-2 simulator. According to our knowledge, this is the first implementation that supports the WirelessHART network manager as well as the whole stack of the WirelessHART standard. We evaluated the performance of our implementation in terms of delay and communication load in the network. This implementation offers an alternative to expensive testbeds for testing WirelessHART.