Study of routing mechanisms in a WirelessHART network

The use of wireless communication for industrial applications provides several advantages over a wired system. However, an industrial wireless protocol must cope with a great number of challenges in order to assure reliability and safety for these communications. The WirelessHART protocol is the first one developed to cope with industrial environments and is the most accepted by the factory managers nowadays. In this protocol, the route and link scheduling policy is dependent on the centralized network management algorithms and these algorithms may not be optimal. This paper presents an analysis of routing and scheduling data, obtained from a network deployed in laboratory. The acquired data allows to check message paths and the employed routing mechanisms. Temporal data for multi-hop message transmissions are also analyzed. The results revealed problems concerning temporal schedules due to the use of the first available but not optimal link for message transmission. This problem may lead to unnecessary latencies in the network since the manager routing and scheduling algorithms may not ensure the best path between the devices through the links.