When HART Goes Wireless: Understanding and Implementing the WirelessHART Standard

As a newly released industrial communication standard, WirelessHART complements the ever so successful HART field devices by providing the possible means for communicating via wireless channels. The WirelessHART standard is designed to offer simple configuration, flexible installation and easy access of instrument data, and at the same time, ensure robust and reliable communications. In this paper, we first look closely into the specifications and present a comprehensive overview of the standard by summarizing the main functions of the various protocol layers. We then survey the literature and identify amongst the existing methods and algorithms, which ones can be effectively adopted in implementing the standard. More specifically, we set our focus on issues relating to realization of the medium access layer and the network manager, which are essential in creating a successful WirelessHART network for specific applications.