A dual-standard solution for industrial Wireless Sensor Network deployment: Experimental testbed and performance evaluation

Abstract

The scope of this paper is to evaluate the performance of a dual-standard, ISA100.11a and WirelessHART, industrial Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) testbed targeting the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The originality of this paper consists in the evaluation of ISA100.11a and WirelessHART network performance not only side-by-side, but also within a dual-standard architecture. All test scenarios were performed on a real testbed comprising one Dual-Standard VR950 Gateway and 100 VS210 wireless field sensors configured in star and mesh network topologies. The key performance indicators considered are network join time, sensor data publishing success rate and Client/Server interrogations response time. Besides the enhancements provided by a multi-radio access system, the results of this work indicate that a dual-standard solution merges the standalone advantages into an overall better performing Industrial WSN.