Integration aspects of wireless industrial automation

Abstract

As there are many applications on the factory floor that can benefit from wireless communication, existing solutions are constantly driven towards new boundaries. The next step is to augment the capability of such solutions by enhancing network management and control to support mobility while fulfilling the real-time constraints of the system. For such a system, not only parallel operation of individual features such as real-time communication, localisation, clock synchronization, etc. is needed, their integration and interaction with each other is also important. Therefore, this paper focuses on aspects dealing with synergy of these features and shows how the individual features can affect each other in order to build a wireless system that provides functionalities which cannot be reached by its wired equivalent.