Technologies and Methodologies Enabling Reliable Real-Time Wireless Automation

Abstract

Wireless automation is an emerging development that aims at significant savings in installation times and costs of cabling in automation systems, while providing a new level of field of research, engineering and industrial flexibility for system design, reconfiguration, and agility. It is applicable to both new automation systems and retrofit applications. The use of wireless technologies is rather common in consumer applications, consider, for example, cellular phones, cordless desktops, etc., but the strict real-timeliness and reliability requirements of automation systems have limited the use of wireless technology in industrial environments. There are, however, a variety of existing industrial applications of Bluetooth, ZigBee and WLAN networks, but very rarely these are used in time-critical applications. The bulletproof wireless technologies are few, and hence the technologies have not yet spread to wide use in industrial automation. The main concerns in this respect are related to the problem of how the reliability and real-timeliness of wireless communications could be guaranteed.