An OPNET-based simulation approach for the deployment of WirelessHART

WirelessHART, as one of the most popular short-range wireless application standards, is quite popular in the industry field. Due to stringent timing requirements of the WirelessHART protocol, simulating the resource allocation and the corresponding time consumption are essential for better performance. The paper aims at developing a WirelessHART simulation platform based on OPNET. In order to simulate the mechanism of the TDMA resource allocation and mesh internetworking, a simple WirelessHART protocol stack is discussed. A series of experiments are conducted. The simulation result shows that the proposed simulation network is good at load balancing when the workload of the network is low, and has a very good stability; the bit error rate reached 0.01%, shows good anti-disturbance performance. In a word, the proposed simulation platform is suitable for industrial network simulation, and effective support for future research such as routing protocol and allocation algorithm, etc.