Performance Evaluations of Multi-hop WirelessHART Network and 6LoWPAN using Different Topologies

WirelessHART is an industry leading wireless sensor networking protocol featuring mesh networking, multi-hopping, and robust communications for applications in harsh industrial environments. The mesh network allows sensors to be out of the range of a network manager and pass messages to the network manager through closely located devices in the network. The message may hop through multiple devices to reach the network manager. Thus, the topology of the network affects various performance metrics, including latency, reliability, and stability. In this paper, two topologies are studied and analyzed basing upon their latencies and reliabilities. The standard mesh network configuration requires multiple parent motes for a sensor, while as the single path configuration has single parent mote of multi hopping for each sensor, which is the worst case of the topologies. The reliability of the standard configuration is consistently 100.00% during an experiment of 22 days, while as the reliabilities for the loop configurations is 100.00
^%
for a period of 4 days. This finding confirms our previously reported study that wireless HART performance is highly robust even using the worst topology. The WirelessHART network is also compared with another 802.15.4 derivative, 6LoWPAN, sharing the same network topology of a single path. The 6LoWPAN network shows a reliability of 99.84% during a test period of 7 days, while the WirelessHART network shows a reliability of 99.94%.