Introducing a simulation tool for WirelessHART networks

The process automation is adopting hybrid solutions composed of wired and wireless communication networks for sensors and actuators. This approach will extend the scalability of the plants keeping the efficiency at high levels. Among the wireless communication protocols for process automation, WirelessHART has high popularity even if the network management functionalities are not described in the standard. In fact, the network manager implementation is left to manufacturers that can choose among the plurality of solutions (routing theory, graph theory etc) available in the literature. In this paper, a new simulation tool for evaluating and improving performance of WirelessHART networks is proposed. The WirelessHART simulator will allow the test of network management strategies for complex networks without the implementation of expensive testbeds. Moreover, the simulator can give information about timing and power consumption of nodes, since the properties of real transceiver can be inserted as simulation parameters.