Wireless tehcnology offers great opportunities for the process industries. Wireless connectivity of the field devices in oil and gas and other chemical processing plants enables monitoring and control in remote and difficult environments, and low maintenance costs according to ABB1 and other vendors.

Importance of data and timeliness of information availability requires time synchronised, energy efficient, time-bounded and resource aware design of wireless network. Control over wireless requires optimisation between control and communication demand.

Reference

1. ABB Instrumentation, 2009, Wireless Instrumentation driving down installation and connectivity cost with wireless connectivity, on-line

Publications

• Ikram, W., Stoianov, I., and Thornhill N.F., 2010, Towards a radio-controlled time synchronized wireless sensor network: a work in-progress paper, presented at IEEE EFTA Conference, Bilbao, Spain, September 2010.
• Ikram, W., and Thornhill, N.F., 2010, Wireless communication in process automation: a survey of opportunities, requirements, concerns and challenges, presented at IFAC Control 2010, Coventry, UK, September 2010.
• Ikram, W., and Thornhill, N.F., 2013, Towards the development of a wireless network node lifetime calculation tool, Work in progress paper, Accepted for IEEE Conference on Emerging Technologies in Factory Automation, ETFA 2014.