Performance Evaluation of Industrial Wireless Sensor Network Technologies

Abstract

This article describes how with the continuous developments in communication technology, the use of wireless network devices is increasing rapidly. However, most companies still rely on wired networks and do not trust wireless networks, especially for process control applications. The confidence in wireless technologies can be built by first evaluating the technology before using it for industrial applications. To this end, the performance of three wireless sensor networks (WSNs) standards, namely, ZigBee, WirelessHART and ISA100, is evaluated. The performance metrics are the throughput, the end to end delay, and the energy consumption. The results show that ISA100 and WirelessHART perform better than ZigBee in large networks. In addition, ISA100 is more flexible than WirelessHART, since it allows using the combination of slotted and slow hopping and configurable timeslot sizes.