An Autonomous Address Translation Scheme to Integrate Modbus with IEEE 802.15.4 Networks

Abstract

With advent of a plethora of wireless communica-tion schemes capable of transferring digital data and packet data at variety of data rates, Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems also need to migrate from wired to wireless medium for data communication. Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) in a traditional SCADA system communicate with master station using Modbus RTU/ASCII over wired media. However, these SCADA systems can be integrated with some wireless communication scheme by adding some bare minimum hardware and doing some additional configuration. This paper proposes such a novel address translation scheme using which the slave PLCs using the serial variants of Modbus serial protocol in a SCADA system can integrate with IEEE 802.15.4 wireless network. The hardware architecture on which the proposed scheme is implemented is provided, along with the process to achieve address translation and seamless integration of Modbus with the IEEE 802.15.4 network.