Performance indicators for wireless industrial communication networks

The recent improvements of the wireless networks performance offer a valuable opportunity also in the context of industrial communication systems. However, these systems are often subjected to such tight reliability requirements as well as timing constraints that wireless communications, especially in an interfered scenario, can hardly comply with. A thorough performance assessment is hence needed both at the design stage and during the typical operating life. In such a direction it is important to define some performance indicators that can monitor the main parameters of industrial communication systems employing wireless networks. In this paper a set of performance indicators for polling-based industrial communication is introduced. Then, two case studies of industrial communication systems that make use of two different wireless networks (namely the IEEE 802.11 WLAN and the IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN) are presented and the relevant performance indicators are experimentally measured. The purpose is to show how the performance indicators may provide useful insights in the behavior of the systems as well as how they may be positively influenced by a careful selection of some key parameters.