Wireless Sensor Networks in Industry 4.0: WirelessHART and ISA100.11a

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a key technology in the scenario of Industry 4.0. Just like any IoT architecture, Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) plays a fundamental hole, but the factory floor presents challenges that made usual WSN technologies inadequate. This paper addresses and compares the main features of the two WSN standards developed specially for an industrial application, WirelessHART and ISA100.11A. The main contribution of this work is the comparison between them in the context of IoT in Industry 4.0. The results show that the two standards have many similarities and almost equal performances in factory floor conditions, and can even coexist. However, ISA100 has some features that make it more aligned with the Industry 4.0 concepts.