Research on Wireless Backup for CAN in Process Control System

Connecting microcontrollers, sensors and actuators by several communication systems is state of the art within the electronic architectures of process control. By now, the means of communication for process control is widely based on the fieldbus technology. While wireless communication is much talked about, there are still limited real products for the process control. Controller area network (CAN) is one of the common fieldbus technologies. Its arbitrating mechanism ensures that all the messages are transferred according to the priority of their identifiers. But some missions in process control will require additionally deterministic behavior in the communication during service. One way to solve this issue using CAN is the extension of CAN protocol, adding the wireless communication module as the backup. This paper gives an approach to this kind of wireless communication module together with the wireless communication protocol, and integrate it in CAN. A lot of research was done on the wireless backup to learn how to help and how much it can help.