A SOLUTION TO BUILD WIRELESS COMMUNICATION DEVICE FOR PLC USING ZIGBEE STANDARD

Abstract

In today's industrial production plants, conventional wired monitoring and control systems that require trenching to place new wires, repairing or replacing old cables can be extremely costly, due to the possibility of low expansion and high failure rate of connectors. This paper provides a wireless communication device building solution for a programmable logic controller (PLC) using the ZigBee standard. A hardware solution of the equipment was implemented, using a PLC paired with an Ethernet standard converter and XBee S2 wireless communication module. Thereby building a wireless network including three types of devices: Gateway; Router; End device. Network performance has been assessed through the following parameters: Network scalability, reliability, flexibility, network routing, and packet transmission rate of the entire network. The results show that the wireless communication unit for PLC has transmission distance of 55.5m and 26.05m, packet transmission rate is 98.4% and 84.2% respectively in an obstacle-free and obstructive environment. The experimental wireless network model performs self-routing when link failure and flexible network expansion.