Performance assessment of a WirelessHART network in a real-world testbed

Advantages of wireless fieldbuses, as cabling cost reduction, improved scalability and flexibility, are well known. In particular, the advent of WirelessHART, the first open and standard protocol dedicated to process control, has made wireless adoption a reality in industrial applications. This paper deals with the performance evaluation of WirelessHART network applied to a real-world testbed. The characterization of the network performance is done in the time domain, evaluating the latency of data transfer between sensors and host system. A straightforward but effective test network (comprising a supervisor, a gateway and two nodes) has been designed and implemented, then the impact of wireless and wired link delays have been measured. As a preliminary result, a latency of about 1 s characterizes the interaction between the wireless node and the gateway, although an overall transfer delay of about 3 s is measured at the host application side.