Viability and guidelines for the effective integration of consumer WiFi in industrial plants

Wireless solutions are becoming frequent in manufacturing plants: the introduction of wireless in industrial automated processes requires solutions which fulfill industrial environmental and electromagnetic requirements and meet reliability and communication performance typically required by control loops. In this paper these issues are discussed and set by a practical case involving WiFi transceivers, requiring an EMC (Electromagnetic Compatibility) industrial certification and almost deterministic near real-time guarantees. The solution here presented shows how the above two goals can be achieved using cheap off-the-shelf components: the EMC conditions are satisfied thanks to practical tricks (proposed as guidelines), while near real-time performance is enabled by proper configurations of IEEE 802.11e parameters.