Latency and Packet Loss of an Interferred 802.15.4 Channel in an Industrial Environment

There is currently a rapid development of new types of wireless communication channels for industrial automation. This paper aims to provide some experimental data and theoretical justification on packet latency and packet loss for a wireless communication channel exposed to intentional radio interference. The intentional radio interference used in the experiments is an attempt to simulate possible future co-existence scenarios in a dense wireless communication environment at an industrial site. For the cases tested packet loses of less than 10% was obtained. Latency is shown to depend on channel access and will has a deterministic behaviour.