A Methodology for the Analysis of 802.11a Links in Industrial Environments

Abstract

Wireless solutions are becoming more and more attractive for the communication systems of manufacturing plants. If the advantages of wireless are clear and have been extensively discussed, also the drawbacks need to be considered and, among them, the impact of an industrial environment on error rate and throughput of the wireless links. These performance aspects get even more critical when developing wireless solutions for safety-critical industrial communications and using off-the-shelf components. The first step in evaluating these solutions is to characterize the channel behavior of the selected wireless platform for a set of real-life scenarios representative of different operating conditions. We present a methodology and software tool aimed at analyzing WLAN channel behaviors and we apply it to evaluate the use of 802.11a consumer chipsets for a typical safety critical industrial plant application.