A wireless gateway approach enabling industrial real-time communication on the field level of factory automation

Industrial communication systems increasingly deploy wireless technologies. In order to benefit from flexibility and cost saving potentials, wireless systems have to cope with the requirements of industrial applications, in particular timing constraints. Due to their hard and isochronous real-time characteristics, control applications on the field level of factory automation have not been considered for wireless communication, yet. This paper addresses the use of wireless Point-to-Point communication in conjunction with Industrial Ethernet protocols on field level by means of a modular gateway architecture. The main contributions of this work include: wireless Industrial Ethernet gateway design, its implementation on Sercos III and Wi-Fi based demonstrator platform and its evaluation by means of empirical measurements showing the applicability of the proposed approach.