ReICOvAir

To enable the industry to use wireless communication instead of traditional wired connections for controlling and monitoring, confidence in and reliability of the wireless connections must be given. This requires proofing the suitability of a wireless communication system for a given application with a standardized validation/rating system.

Although much network planning and connectivity estimation is done, still no such system exists. In the ReICOvAir project the necessary standards, methods and tools for providing proof are developed, standardized and integrated into a single comprehensive software and hardware testbed solution. By gathering requirements from the industry a rating system for wireless communication systems will be developed (e.g. maximum delay and packet error rate under certain interference conditions).

A set of relevant test-cases for the rating process will be defined. These will consist of standard use cases (e.g. an interference scenario) as well as methods of referencing individual reception scenarios to a given standard test case (e.g. finding the worst-case scenario of a real deployment). Both rating system and test cases shall be provided to European standardization bodies.

The Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz Institute develops a propagation channel model enhanced for industrial environments that can be used to simulate the wireless propagation conditions. Measurements are done to confirm the correctness of the model and extract parameters for the channel model. Furthermore, this model is used to emulate wireless propagation conditions in a channel emulator as part of the validation/rating system.