WirelessHART modeling and performance evaluation

In process industries wired supervisory and control networks are more and more replaced by wireless systems. Wireless communication inevitably introduces time delays and message losses, which may degrade the system reliability and performance. WirelessHART, as the first international standard for wireless process supervision and control has received notable academic attention. This paper models WirelessHART networks with link failures using Discrete-time Markov chains and evaluates the network performance in a typical WirelessHART environment with respect to delay and reachability. The evaluation shows that although the performance of WirelessHART is influenced by several factors, it is capable to deliver reliable service in typical industrial environments. The proposed model can also be used to predict path performance and to provide routing suggestions.