Real-time quality surveillance for industrial radio environments

At the verge of a fourth industrial revolution, known as Industrie 4.0, wireless technologies are essential for the realization of the ""Smart Factory". They are still however used with reservation in industrial automation applications that have strict quality of service (QoS) constraints and high reliability and real-time capability requirements. Coexistence management and robustness against interference are thus key characteristics for any solutions involving wireless technologies in the industry. For this purpose, we propose a hardware-independent software-only wireless watchdog system for continuous quality surveillance of industrial radio environments. The proposed system captures, analyses, and visualizes the radio spectrum identifying and classifying the wireless technologies already operating at a certain production site. This will in fact facilitate installing of new solutions and eventually wireless planning, thus making coexistence of industrial wireless technologies feasible. The proposed system also identifies and alarms in real time against sources of interference as well as unauthorized transmitters that might interfere with critical production processes.