Industrial applications of IEEE 802.11e WLANs

Nowadays, wireless communication technologies are being employed in an ever increasing number of different application areas, including industrial environments. Unfortunately, because of several reasons, among which their random access technique, they are not usually considered suitable for connecting devices at the field level. In this paper, the performance that can be achieved by QoS-enabled WLANs (e.g., IEEE 802.11e networks) to support communication in industrial environments is analysed in depth. In particular, it is shown that they can be profitably adopted even at the shop-floor, provided that there are not critical safety requirements or tight timing constraints. Despite the lower determinism and reliability, the resulting performance resembles closely that achievable with fieldbuses.