Testing system for IEEE 1451.5–802.11 standard-based wireless sensors

The hierarchical architecture of factory equipment networks consists of the factory level, cell level, and device level. The equipment at different levels of the factory networks may employ different network communication protocols. The challenges that industry faces are how to easily and efficiently test all kinds of equipment with different network communication protocols at different network levels. The Factory Equipment Network Testing (FENT) framework provides a solution to solve the problem described. The FENT framework can be used to test different factory equipment including sensors, actuators, and controllers in a networked production environment. This paper introduces a testing system for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1451.5–802.11 standard-based wireless sensors. The testing system based on the FENT framework consists of an Universal Client Application (UCA), UCA Application Programming Interface (API), IEEE 1451.5–802.11 Personality Module (PM), packet capture (Wireshark), and Equipment under Test (EUT) that is an IEEE 1451.5–802.11 wireless sensor. This testing system developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was used to remotely test the real-time performance of wireless sensors for the condition monitoring of machine tools. A test case of remote testing the IEEE 1451.5–802.11 wireless sensors is provided to verify and validate the functionality of the FENT framework.