Delay performance of radio physical layer technologies as candidates for wireless extensions to industrial networks

The benefits of wireless extensions in industrial networks are well recognized as long as the integration of the wireless and fieldbus domains will be capable to offer the realtime and dependability quality of the current wired industrial networking solutions. This paper presents a study, from a performance point of view, for the possible integration of the most popular 3G and WLAN radio technologies with fieldbus technologies. A brief examination of a number of dominant wireless protocols against the basic wireless fieldbus requirements is presented. For the case study, Profibus is used, on which, the basic message cycle performance is calculated for each of the UNITS, 802.11b and HIPERLAN protocols, under different integration approaches.