ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of typical industrial automation applications, explain how they differ from other domains, and highlight the key challenges when developing wireless sensor networks (WSN) for the industrial automation industry. In stead of investing lots of time in frequency planning and network design, performance of the network can be improved by adding router nodes that provide alternate/redundant paths for the wireless sensors. In the star topology, the most prevalent topology today, the wireless nodes communicate with a gateway device that bridges the communication to a wired network. The requirements of any WSN solution will always depend heavily on the particular application in mind. WirelessHART forms mesh topology networks, providing redundant paths, which allow messages to be routed around physical obstacles, broken links, and interference. WirelessHART provides end-to-end and hop-to-hop security measures through payload encryption and message authentication on the network and data-link layers.
