Wireless Communications with Ultra-High Performances (WirelessHP) for Critical Industrial Controls

Zhibo Pang1

  • 1ABB Corporate Research, Sweden

Details

16:40 - 17:00 | Fri 17 Mar | Main Room | S7.5

Session: Reliable and Low-Latency Wireless Communications

Abstract

In the era of Industry 4.0, the area of wireless communications for industrial applications is being redefined. The "industrial wireless communications" has been studied for decades, but unfortunately, the previous efforts were trying to "borrow" technologies (e.g. chips) from consumer electronics as-is and therefore rarely succeeded in the market due to compromises of performances and requirements. Driven by the real use cases of critical controls, the WirelessHP will go far beyond the performances that can be provided by the consumer technologies, which is essentially needed if you want industrial customers to pay for it (instead of telling a story for free). We cannot make compromises in performances/requirements anymore, because the gap is 10-100 times or even larger in terms of latency and reliability. We need new radios, new chips, new fundamental standards, etc.
In this presentation, I will introduce promising use cases of the WirelessHP in process industries like mining, factory automation, robotics, power systems and power electronics. To make these use cases into real business, wireless technology with Gbps data rate, sub microsecond slot time, and 10e-6 to 10e-9 packet error rate is demanded. Then I will show the big gap between the requirements and state-of-the-art technologies or projects like WIrelessHART, ISA100, WISA, WISA, PNO WSAN, WIA-PA, WIA-FA, RF-WIFI, FAST, ProWiLAN, etc. The latest progress of our scaled-down demonstrator based on Software Defined Radio will be presented.