WirelessHART localization algorithm

The growth in the use of wireless sensor networks has made possible the development of improvements that meet the needs of the communication industry, including several devices with to low cost, low power consumption, mobility and ease of integration, installation and configuration advantages. Not only that but they also create additional functionalities, such as showing the location of field engineers who are active in industrial environments. The WirelessHART protocol is an open standard for wireless communication that seeks to meet these qualities. This study presents a development of an application for the localization of a mobile device via the WirelessHART network. Different methods are analyzed to estimate the distance between the mobile node and the other fixed elements of the wireless sensor network, such as deployment topologies and algorithms, which are used to compute the data and determine the location in a coordinate plane. The operation of the proposed system and the location method were evaluated by means of simulations and practical tests. Due to the conditions used for the installation of the devices, it was possible to obtain a range of radio transmission over 100 m, which allowed to determine an area of monitoring system of about 100 m × 100 m. The results obtained from the error location reached between a 72% and 80% of the estimated localization that was less than 5 meters.