Emulated network of IEEE 1451 application with multiple smart sensor reports

Sensors and actuators are used in wide range of applications in industry for monitoring, control and automation. IEEE 1451 is a suite of transducer interface standards trying to unify the transducer interfaces and thus to achieve an interoperable network of transducers. This paper deals with an emulated network of network capable application processors (NCAP)s which exchange messages as outlined in functional specifications of IEEE 1451.1 (Dot1). Although Dot1 will be going through changes that would enable compatibility with newly-released IEEE 1451.0, the functional data exchange in the application layer is expected to stay consistent with smart sensor node concepts in Dot0. Therefore, the objective has been the demonstration of communication between multiple NCAPs over a network and thus to showcase the functionality of a 1451 based communication model. To our knowledge, this demonstration is the first of its kind that shows the emerging standards of 1451 in a sensor networking environment.