Development of Bluewave: A Wireless Protocol for Industrial Automation

There is a growing trend in developing the wireless machine-to-machine (M2M) communication for factory automation. Currently, most wireless protocols for infrastructureless mobile ad-hoc networks focus on the mobility issue and are mainly suitable for narrowband radio devices. The mechanisms for route update and discovery that work well for wireless mobile ad-hoc networks prove to be redundant and instead add to processing overheads in a static wireless factory setting. This paper presents the development and implementation of a new wireless routing protocol, Bluewave, that caters specifically to wireless communication between machines in a factory setting. Bluewave utilizes features of Bluetooth technology when performing the route setup. The merits of the proposed protocol, in terms of shorter initialization time and route setup time, are duly discussed. A case study illustrating the application of Bluewave to an online condition-based maintenance scenario is presented. Experimental results obtained are furnished to show the viability of Bluewave in industrial automation