ZigBee based wireless modbus aggregator for intelligent industrial facilities

Industrial intelligent devices need to rely on already implemented protocols and need to maintain a backwards compatibility. Industrial facilities are continuously extending and they include more and more of such devices. Modbus is a well-known, simple, easy to implement and widely used protocol in industrial facilities. Modbus protocol is used over a variety of wired serial interfaces such as RS485, RS422 or RS232 or even ethernet. This paper presents an innovative ZigBee based industrial communication system that aggregates the data from multiple Modbus slaves. Each end device interrogates a Modbus slave line and the master aggregates the data from all end devices, thus speeding the interrogation rate and easing the installation due to the wireless nature of ZigBee communication.