Comparison and Evaluation of Industrial Wireless Sensor Network Standards ISA100.11a and WirelessHART
Gengyun Wang · Chalmers Publication Library (Chalmers University of Technology) · 2011
For the reason of ever-growing interest on the utilization of wireless technologies in industrial automation applications, a series of wireless standards that highlight robustness, power efficiency and security, keep struggling with each other.For instance, WirelessHART [8] and ISA-100.11a-2009[1], which are two competing wireless standards in process automation industry, both build on the same IEEE STD 802.15.4-2006 radio [2] and aim at the same objectives.In this report, we will present the significant differences that we have found between ISA100.11a and WirelessHART, regarding network architectures, functionalities of protocol layers and network operation.For instance, compared with WirelessHART ISA100.11aincludes comprehensive design of Security Manager, defines three variations of channel hopping schemes, supports legacy protocol tunneling (WirelessHART only supports HART protocol tunneling) to highlight interoperability and etc.An evaluation report about different provisioning schemes in ISA100.11aand WirelessHART is embedded in the report.Moreover, I will also provide a general view about the possibility of convergence for these two opponents.