Research on the Hybrid Network Technology of Industrial Ethernet and Zigbee for Monitoring the Ship Power System

This paper analyzed current and future needs of monitoring the ship power system, the network characteristics of industrial Ethernet and Zigbee, and put forward a hybrid network of them for monitoring the ship power system. Moreover, according to protocol structure of Zigbee, this paper demonstrated direct and indirect implementations of the gateway between industrial Ethernet to Zigbee, and implemented the indirect one from the perspective of hardware and software. Finally, the hybrid network was used to monitor the operation of the propulsion motor in the ship power system with one test, monitoring data. Fortunately, the results of technical analysis and engineering tests showed that the hybrid network, which was put forward in this paper, runs stable and viable, and could meet the current and future network performance needs of monitoring the ship power system.