Towards WirelessHART protocol decentralization: A proposal overview

Abstract

Wireless industrial equipments for monitoring and process control are being widely adopted nowadays. Their main advantage lies in the ease of installation when compared with wired devices. However, link reliability and the strict real time communication requirements are frequently cited as real obstacles. To cope with this, adequate wireless protocols for industrial automation must present features such as deterministic temporal behavior, clock synchronization, and mesh topology. These characteristics lead to the adoption of centralized architectures such as the WirelessHART, the most relevant wireless communication protocol for industrial automation commercially available. By means of thorough analysis of this protocol and the current state of the art, several improvements can be proposed. This paper proposes a decentralized network manager, which should be able to coordinate with other network managers in order to perform a distributed message scheduling. This brings up several advantages such as the faster join and leave of field devices, faster and efficient scheduling schemes, increase of overall reliability and new possible mixed topologies. On the other hand, the proposal raises issues that must be solved in order to obtain practical results. The proposal is introduced in this paper as well as the first evaluations. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.