Intelligent wireless communication devices for efficient data transfer and machine control

Despite of the disadvantages of wired IT infrastructures, Ethernet-based communication devices have been common to operate in plant floor environments due to their high bandwidth and security aspects. As WiFi and ZigBee technologies become more mature, it will not be surprising to see WiFi interfaces embedded in communication devices together with ZigBee and other interfaces in the near future by default. To leverage the coexistence of both technologies for improving the communication performance between sensor nodes and backend systems, the authors propose an intelligent communication device inspecting the transmission quality and therefore avoiding connection loss and missing process data by using switching mechanisms between available wireless technologies. A prototype of this proposed system has been designed and implemented and extensive experiments in industrial environment have been conducted. The results show that the proposed system can achieve significantly higher network reliability and efficiency than common communication interfaces running with only one wireless interface.