WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK PERFORMANCE IN HIGH VOLTAGE AND HARSH INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS

Sammanfattning: The applications of wireless sensor networks, WSN, are getting popular in the different areas reaching from daily usage to industrial usage. The performance evaluation of WSN deployed in industrial and high-voltage areas is receiving a great attention and becoming an interesting area of research. This thesis addresses the performance issues of WSN in high-voltage and harsh industrial environments. This study has been carried out at the facilities of High Voltage Test Lab of ABB. Typically, wireless sensor network contains wireless field devices (nodes) connected to a base station via a central gateway. The gate way centralizes information gathered and processed by the nodes. The nodes can communicate with each other and with the gateway via radio wave. The quality and usability of the data sent by WSN can be degraded due to the packet loss and delay. In the presence of high-voltage, the electromagnetic interference, EMI, can affect the performance of WSN. In this study the performance of WSN is evaluated in terms of packet loss and delay. We also focus on the effect of EMI on hardware devices as well as on signal transmission. EMI was expected at wide frequency band due to harsh industrial and high voltage environments. It was expected that EMIs could increase a bit error rate and/or packet loss. The EMI can also change the sensitivity of the nodes. For the performance evaluation of WSN network throughput, latency, path stability, data reliability and average value of the received signal strength indicator, RSSI, are used and measured. The results show that the electromagnetic frequencies of harsh industrial and high voltage environments affect the wireless sensor network performance.