A Perfomance Comparison of WirelessHART and ZigBee in Oil Refinery

Future Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies will be required to support highly reliable and lowlatency machine-type connectivity. In this article, we illustrate an experimental case study inside an industrial oil refinery plant and highlight a performance comparison between two popular industrial standards, namely the textbf{\textit{Wireless{HART (WH), now standardized in IEEE 802.15.4e and ZigBee (ZB), based on IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. The oil refinery is located in a tropical region that is subject to variable weather conditions. The paper introduces, at first, the experimental context and the deployment scenarios. Then, it gives a description of the collected measurements in the refinery and related comparative analysis based on common metrics, such as Successful Transmission Rate, RSSI, and Path Stability, among other parameters.