A Location-Determination Application in WirelessHART

Abstract

WirelessHART is an emerging wireless communication standard that is targeted at the real-time process control industry.An example application of wireless communication in an industrial process control plant is the location of field engineers. The capability to locate personnel is a safety critical issue in process control plants because of high risks posed by toxic chemicals and other hazards. This paper presents the design, implementation and evaluation of a location-aware application built upon WirelessHART. The aim of this application is to locate a mobile device (and thus the person carrying the device) via the deployed WirelessHART network. The application is a software-based - no device modifications are required. Consequently, it is applicable to any WirelessHART network. In this application, both the mobile device (a handheld device or a badge carried by a worker) and field devices (attached to the plant process) periodically send health reports of their neighbors to the network manager. The network manager analyzes these reports and discards the untrustworthy pairs through comparison. Next, the network manager feeds the average received signal indications to a well-trained radio propagation model to derive the location. To evaluation our solution, several preliminary experiments are carried out and the results are very promising, with a median error less than 4 meters, which is good enough for the industrial requirement. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop location-aware application in WirelessHART networks.