A Calibrated Test-set for Measurement of Access-Point Time Specifications in Hybrid Wired/Wireless Industrial Communication

In factory automation and process control systems, hybrid wired/wireless networks are often deployed to connect devices of difficult reachability such as those mounted on mobile equipment. A widespread implementation of these networks makes use of Access Points (APs) to implement wireless extensions of Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) networks via the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN (WLAN). Unfortunately, APs may introduce random delays in frame forwarding, mainly related to the their internal behavior (e.g. queue management, processing times), that clearly impact on the overall worst case execution time of real-time tasks involved in industrial process control systems. As a consequence, the knowledge of such delays becomes a crucial design parameter, and their estimation is definitely of utterly importance. In this scenario, the paper presents an original and effective method to measure the aforementioned delays introduced by APs, exploiting a hybrid loop-back link and a simple yet accurate set-up with moderate instrumentation requirements. The proposed method, which requires an initial calibration phase by means of a reference AP, has been successfully tested on some commercial APs to prove its effectiveness. The proposed measurement procedure is proven to be general and, as such, can be profitably adopted in even different scenarios.