Performance of a PC/104 based wireless diagnostics system

This paper presents a performance analysis of a prototype diagnostics system targeted for industrial applications. The system consists of wireless sensor modules and an access point, which controls modules and bridges the measurement data to fixed network. The prototype hardware platform consists of PC/104 based embedded computers equipped with A/D converters, battery packs, diagnostics application and protocol software, and IEEE 802.11b Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) adapters. The power consumption and the size of the diagnostics modules are optimized to enable 8 hours wireless operation on batteries. Network measurement results indicate adequate reliability using up to 90% of the available network throughput significantly, and the placement of modules becomes important. Performance of the 300 MHz PC/104 platform is adequate for the diagnostics module, but the access point requires a higher performance processor.