Design and Implementation of a Network Manager for Industrial Automation Application in WirelessHART Networks

Abstract: Wireless technology has been advancing a lot over the years and it has become mature enough to be used in industrial process control. Wireless sensor networks have overtaken the wired devices and are vastly adapted across the industry. Using wireless technologies in industrial process control results in easy installation and configuration of network and helps in reduction of overall cost. Applying wireless technologies has greater benefits but on the other hand it provides challenges due to harsh industrial environments. Nowadays, wireless sensor devices are smart enough to detect the problems within the network and are capable of producing health reports. To use the capabilities of these smart devices a centralized management is required.  A centralized network manager can manage these smart devices to improve the overall network. Network manager plays a pivotal role because it is a central part of the network and a bad network manager results in network performance degradation. This thesis work addresses the need of centralized network management and proposes a design for the network manager based on the WirelessHART standard. Several algorithms are developed based on the layered architecture of WirelessHART  and a user-friendly graphical user interface is designed for the network manager which is capable of displaying real-time performance and statistics of the network, adding and configuring the nodes, creating routes for the nodes, showing routing tables and neighbour tables and display the network topology. Any change in the network is reflected and displayed by the GUI at run time. The designed network manager is implemented and tested using both simulated packets and real hardware and the work is evaluated using Average Packet Delivery Ratio, Average End to End Delay and by comparing the work to already designed network managers.