802.11g Signal Strength Evaluation in an Industrial Environment

Abstract

The advances in wireless network technologies and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) devices are easing the establishment of what is called Industry 4.0. For the industrial environments, the wireless networks are more suitable mainly due to their great flexibility, low deployment cost and for being less invasive. Although new wireless protocols are emerging or being updated, changes in existing industries generally can lead to large expenditures. As the well known and accepted IEEE 802.11g standard, mostly used in residential and commercial applications, has a low deployment and maintenance cost, many industries also decide to adopt it. In this scenario, there is a need to evaluate the signal quality to better design the network infrastructure in order to obtain good communication coverage. In this work, we present a practical study about the 802.11g signal strength in a thermoelectric power plant. We collected signal strength values in different points along the engine room and compared our measured values with the estimated ones through the Log-Distance Path Loss model. We concluded that it is possible to use this model in an industrial environment to estimate signal strength with a low error by choosing the right propagation (path loss) exponent.