Design and performance evaluation of a distributed WirelessHART sniffer based on IEEE1588

Wireless communications in the industrial automation world still suffer from lack of standardization. WirelessHART, released in September 2007, is still the only open communication standard specifically designed for real-time process control applications. This paper presents an innovative distributed tool for capturing WirelessHART packets in the field. In fact, even if tools for compliance assessment have been already proposed, an instrument for in situ testing is not yet available. WirelessHART implements a time synchronized mesh network in order to ensure the reliability of the wired counterpart. For this reason, a distributed packet analyzer (“sniffer”) must ensure synchronization among all probes to provide a spatial/temporal image of wireless traffic. The solution we propose is based on commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and exploits a wired measuring network that uses IEEE1588 to reach this goal. Several experiments have been conducted in order to verify the feasibility of our proposal and to evaluate performances.