Cascading wireless industrial workcells

With the ever expanding implementation of Wireless Networked Control Systems in industrial automation, there is a need to guarantee that several workcells utilizing such systems can coexist in the same vicinity. Cascading several cells in different orientations is studied in this paper, with the goal of achieving direct concatenation with zero meters between cells. Different channel allocations are studied and analyzed in order to achieve correct operation of cascaded cells. It is shown that sensors and actuators communicating using the standard and unmodified 802.11 b protocol send and receive packets correctly, within sampling period deadlines. System performance is also studied in the existence of interference from the 2.4 GHz range guaranteeing correct packet transmission/reception. All simulations are run on OPNET Network Modeler, and results are subjected to a 95% confidence analysis.