Implementation of hybrid wired and Wireless Foundation Fieldbus

Wireless foundation fieldbus (WFF) is put forward and used to provide wireless communication services for process industrial field devices to implement monitoring, control and management tasks. WFF communication model consists of the foundation fieldbus (FF) user layer and application layer, the data link layer and the IEEE802.11 physical layer. The WFF data link layer combines FF and IEEE802.11 mechanisms to satisfy the requirements of the automation tasks. WFF can be hybrid with wired FF. The hybrid is implemented on the interoperability of WFF and FF user applications and devices. To guarantee the performance of a hybrid field network, a unified system management and scheduling mechanisms are used to construct and perform the automation tasks, and interconnecting devices convert and forward communications between FF and WFF devices on the data link layer. The analysis shows the communication performance of the hybrid network can satisfy the different real-time requirements of the automation system.