Wi-HTest : Compliance Test Tool for Real-Time WirelessHART TM Mesh Network Devices

WirelessHARTTM was released in September 2007 and became IEC standard in April 2010 (IEC 62591). It is the first open wireless communication standard specifically designed for real-time process control applications. It is designed to the same standard as its wired counterpart for reliability and interoperability. To ensure the compliance with the HARTTM Communication Protocol and the adherence to its strict timing requirements, all WirelessHART devices must be thoroughly tested and registered with the HART Communication Foundation (HCF). In this paper, we present Wi-HTest, the test suite developed to exercise WirelessHART devices, thus facilitating compliance assessment. We discuss the detailed architecture of Wi-HTest and highlight several critical features like packet handling with accurate timing control, fault data injection, and the virtual network approach for scalable test setup. We also describe a sniffer called Wi-Analys for capturing WirelessHART packets along with their timing information and a post process suite for analyzing the packets. These three tools together provide the complete compliance verification environment for WirelessHART. Based on the test specification developed by HCF, we presented several representative test cases for examining WirelessHART devices’ behaviors in different layers. These test cases in turn show that Wi-HTest is a novel and efficient test suite for verifying the compliance of WirelessHART devices.