Design and development of wireless foundation fieldbus industrial networks

It is clear that the future is in deploying wireless technologies in Industrial environments. Nowadays, all different fields which depend on networking try to convert those networks into wireless ones in order to minimize cost and time. Obviously, Industry is one of those fields. This paper investigates the suitability and the ways of applying wireless solutions to the current network standards available in the industry. Fieldbus is one of those standards on which our investigation will be built. Different wireless technologies will be investigated in order to see which standard is suitable to be applied on the fieldbus industrial network; among such technologies are Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11, Zigbee IEEE 802.15 and Bluetooth. Those technologies are chosen because they are nearly suitable in applying them to Fieldbus Industrial Networking through analyzing there effects on the Industrial Environment. Wireless IEEE 802.11 will be our primary focus because it has the features and the capabilities to be nearly applied on the fieldbus standard in the industrial plants and it is the most used technology in the market as well as will as its familiarity. Wireless will be applied between different fieldbus segments of the network by maintaining the current fieldbus standard inside each one. Our approach will be tested using simulation tools; mainly the Matlab, in order to prove the suitability of applying wireless technology in the industrial network. Different key performance metrics will be addressed in order to see how the network performance will be improved after applying the wireless technology within it.