Requirements and current solutions of wireless communication in industrial automation

The industrial wireless automation sector exhibits a huge market growth in the last years. Today, many applications already use wireless technologies. However, the existing wireless solutions do not yet offer sufficient performance with respect to real-time and reliability requirements, particularly for closed-loop control applications. As a result, low latency wireless communication technologies will bridge the gap and can become a key factor for the wide-spread penetration of wireless in industrial communication systems. It is therefore the main goal of this paper to provide a comprehensive overview on requirements, current solutions, and challenges as well as opportunities for future wireless industrial systems. Thereby, presented requirement figures, analysis results, and performance evaluations are based on numerous practical examples from industry.