A Black-Box Noninvasive Characterization Method for Industrial Wireless Networks

Abstract

Industrial control systems are increasingly using wireless communications to improve monitoring and control of industrial processes.In existing installations, distances and costs for installation often prohibit the running of new cables and conduits, making wirelesssolutions very attractive. With costs reduced, monitoring of the physical process becomes easier, and operators often desire to extendwireless to include supervisory and feedback control. Feedback control, in particular, requires certain reliability, latency, andperformance guarantees that are difficult to characterize. Industrial wireless solutions rarely make quality-of-service measurementsavailable at the control system level. When they do, indicators such as per-link packet success rate are often difficult to translate intomeaningful metrics useful to the control system designer. This is especially true for multihop mesh network architectures, where it isdifficult to translate link performance to system performance. In this paper, we propose a more useful method to characterize truenetwork latency and reliability of a deployed industrial wireless network without the need for physical layer and link layer performancemetrics and design knowledge.