Towards Predictable and Reliable Wireless Communication in Harsh Environments

The use of wireless communication technologies in the industry offer severaladvantages. One advantage is the ability to deploy sensors where they previously could noteasily be deployed, for instance on parts that rotate. To use wireless communication in industrialcontrol loops, demands on reliability and latency requirements has to be met. This in anenvironment that may be harsh for radio communication. This work presents a reliable, lowlatency wireless communication system. The system is used in a wireless thyristor control loopin a hydro power plant generator. The wireless communication is based on Bluetooth radiomodules. The work shows a latency analysis together with empirical hardware based latencyand packet error rate measurements. The background noise of a hydro power plant station isalso investigated. The average latency between the Bluetooth modules for the proposed systemis 5.09 ms. The packet error rate is 0.00288 for the wireless low latency control system deployedin a hydro power plant.