Plant-Floor Bluetooth Sensors with Adaptive Interference Management

When different wireless devices of various technologies that operate in the same frequency band, are deployed at sensor and controller levels of plant floors, it is possible for them to cause interference to each other´s transmissions. In general Bluetooth or ZigBee like low power solutions are used at sensor levels and high-power solutions like Wi-Fi are used at controller levels. In these contexts, the low-power sensor transmissions suffer more. It results in lesser throughput and higher latencies of sensor data. Because of these increased latencies, sensors may fail to satisfy their real-time data transfer obligations. In such cases, techniques like selective retransmissions of high-priority data and hop-sequence rearrangement of frequency-hopping devices would be useful to manage the interference problems of sensor level devices. Three such methods are proposed in this work. By employing these methods, wireless sensors that operate in interfered environments can be made to support real-time data transfers that are possible with wired sensor buses like controller area network (CAN).