Simulation of WirelessHART networked control system with packet dropout

Industrial communication standard like WirelessHART enables wireless control in process plants. This paper presents a study on wired and wireless networked control system. It emphasizes on using packet dropout array for Markov chain simulation of packet dropout process, a key parameter affecting plant´s performance, in a closed-loop WirelessHART networked control system. Additionally, Bernoulli simulation of the process is covered for comparison purpose. Overshoot was found to be 633.3 % for Bernoulli model, 33.9 % for Markov model and even through it is the major drawback of the system, WirelessHART networked control system is still suitable for control applications when non-time-critical plant has response time longer than sampling period thousands times even with 50 %, 40 % dropout probabilities for Bernoulli, Markov models.