ABSTRACT
Wireless highway addressable remote transmission (WHART), like ISA100.11a, is fast becoming a wireless emerging standard in industrial wireless communication in the area of process control and automation industry. Wireless technologies like Bluetooth, ZigBee, or Wi-Fi cannot be used in industrial sectors because of their inherent drawbacks. WHART is the first open wireless communication standard that provides robust and reliable communication using direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) channel hopping scheme based on IEEE 802.15.4.
WHART protocol stack consists of five layers—presentation and session layers of OSI are absent here.
WHART is a self-healing, self-organizing, time-synchronized mesh network. It is backward compatible with existing HART devices. WHART operates in the 2.4 GHz license free ISM band. It has channel hopping facility.
WHART is a hybrid network consisting of wireless and wired devices. It has channel blacklisting facility which disallows use of determined channels.
WHART architecture consists of WHART field devices, HART-enabled field devices, handheld field devices, access points, gateway, adapters, network manager, security manager, etc. There is end-to-end security in WHART.
WHART provides redundancy at the levels of wireless sensor network (WSN), network access points and at the gateway, network manager, or security manager levels.
