Measurements on an industrial wireless HART network supporting PROFIsafe: A case study

Contrary to the various theoretic publications on safety-critical communication over wireless, this paper will show the actual performance of safety-critical communication in a real plant with all its environmental influences. We used PROFIsafe as a functional safety profile on top of the WirelessHART protocol. Separately these technologies are widely used in industry for safety and wireless communication respectively, but it has never been shown that the combination of them is feasible for safety-critical communication. The main focus of this work is to measure and analyze the round-trip time and the bit error rate of the safety-critical communication in order to identify whether the certification requirements of PROFIsafe holds. We will show that it is technically feasible to run safety-critical data over wireless links. However, long round trip times and high noise in the channel at certain locations in the plant are unacceptable with respect to certification and need further investigations.