An improved adaptive channel hopping scheme for WIA-PA Industrial Wireless Networks

Wireless Industrial communication technology becomes increasingly important and has attracted widespread attention for industrial applications. WIA-PA (Wireless Networks for Industrial Automation-Process Automation) standard is one of the three international industrial wireless standards. Because of operating on shared ISM band, anti-interference is a key issue and WIA-PA standard adopts adaptive channel hopping mechanism to coexist with other interfering systems. However, current WIA-PA standard does not present any specified scheme for the mechanism. In this paper, we propose an improved and integrated adaptive channel hopping scheme for WIA-PA networks. We present a selection approach for channel hopping sequence by considering the interference characteristic. Then we develop a novel channel assessment scheme. The detailed method combining the channel hopping scheme with WIA-PA superframe mechanism is also presented. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can effectively improve the reliability of the system and is easy to implement in practical industrial wireless networks.