Modeling Wireless Sensor/Actuator Network Performance in Factory Automation Environments

Timo A. Schröder, Dirk Krüger, Ralf Heynicke, and Gerd Scholl

Keywords

Performance evaluation, Modelling and simulation, Coexistence, Factory automation

Abstract

Robustness and reliability of wireless systems for factory automation applications mainly depend on their ability to cope with fast fading radio channels in metal-rich environments, their immunity against classical industrial interferers like switch mode power supplies, contactors or relays and their coexistence behavior in the presence of other wireless networks. In what follows a simulation environment for the assessment of network performance will be presented with special focus on the modeling of the time-variant, frequency-selective radio channel in industrial environments. To achieve a realistic packet error rate performance also measurements of immunity against WiFi interferers and bit error rate performance of narrowband low-power radio transceivers with varying preamble and synchronization word lengths and different signal levels were carried out.

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