WirelessHART Fast Collect: A decentralized approach for intermittent field devices

The WirelessHART protocol was designed from scratch specifically for industrial applications, allowing secure, reliable, and real time communications in harsh environments. Its centralized management produces all the communication scheduling and routing, which in turns allows low power and low cost field devices, adequate for slow and static networks. This is typically the case of process control applications. However, the slow dynamics of this protocol avoids the usage of mobile or intermittent devices, such as robots and portable devices for plant coordination or inspection. This paper introduces a special field device that has a network coprocessor incorporated. The coprocessor is able to locally manage network events and, together with a modified field device that can act as an access point, it has the ability to cope with intermittent network events. The device development is described as well as a case study whose results are presented at the end.