WIRE – Wireless Industrial networks with Reliability Enhancements

Description of the project

The main goal of project WIRE is to achieve increased dependability of time-critical wireless communication when used in industrial automation environments. To be accepted for use in industrial applications, wireless technologies must offer similar performance in terms of dependability and predictability as provided by current wired solutions. Wireless solutions of today still fail to do this. Therefore, new research is required, aimed at increasing wireless reliability, availability, robustness, and maintainability subject to real-time constraints. The results will enable wider applicability of wireless communication in time-critical industrial applications, e.g. process control systems.

The project WIRE consortium consists of three partners; Mälardalen University, ABB Corporate Research, and Motion Control AB. Each partner brings its own unique competence and facilities to this co-production effort.

The overall purpose of project WIRE is to widen the applicability of wireless communication to time-critical industrial automation processes, using tools and methods on the link and network layers that results in a scheme which provides more reliable and predictable wireless communication than the current version of WirelessHART does. This overall research problem is divided into two steps:

1. How can communication in wireless automation networks be made more reliable and predictable using recent results on relaying, routing and error control techniques tailored to industrial wireless sensor network?
2. How can dependability of time-critical communication in an industrial wireless sensor network be enhanced to recover from link failure, node failure, and avoiding single points of failure?