Hybrid Wired/Wireless PROFIBUS Architectures: Comparative Performance Analysis in an Error-Prone Environment

The problem of providing a wireless communications for factory automation systems is still an open issue, notwithstanding the fact that there are a large number of solutions. A particularly import condition is for such systems to provide adequate behaviour in error-prone environments. In this paper, we compare, in error-prone conditions, the performance of two approaches that extend the PROFIBUS to support wireless communications. One of these approaches is based on repeaters and another is based on bridges. Additionally, we propose a set of enhancements to the bridge-based approach in order to detect and correct error situations. Copyright © 2002 IFAC