Evaluation of Ultra-Wideband Radio for Industrial Wireless Control

This paper investigates the use of ultra-wideband (UWB) radio for communication in industrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs). OpenWSN is an open-source IPv6 mesh network protocol stack based on IEEE 802.15.4 time slotted channel hopping (TSCH). We adapted OpenWSN to operate an UWB physical layer based on the DecaWave DW1000 UWB transceiver. Experiments were conducted in an industrial steam heating plant environment and an office/laboratory environment to measure the bit error ratio (BER) performance of UWB. The performance of an OpenWSN network using the UWB physical layer was experimentally compared against WirelessHART, an existing industrial wireless automation standard. We found that UWB is a feasible medium for industrial wireless communication in both environments. Experimental results indicate that OpenWSN over UWB achieved better reliability in guaranteed time slots than WirelessHART in an office environment, while WirelessHART lost fewer packets than OpenWSN over UWB.