Development of wireless control and automation systems

Abstract

Wireless technologies have made profound impact in our daily life. It has revolutionized the way people communicate with one another. With the new emerging wireless technologies convergence of voice and data communication via wireless devices is now possible. This allows short range wireless personal communication technologies to become the key enabling technology in many applications. This thesis aim to examine and exploit the use of wireless technologies in 3 different arenas; Home control, Education and Industry automation. In Home control, architecture has been designed and developed to enable the mobile devices to control and monitor the activity of the usera??s home or office PC which can be remotely located. Linking mobile devices with PC enable mobile devices to harness its immense processing speed and storage speed from anywhere. In the education aspect, work have been done on the development, implementation and evaluation of a mobile spreadsheet-based PID control simulation system that aims to enhance the learning of the student in the field of control engineering. Most of the current wireless protocols focus on the mobility issue and are mainly suitable for narrowband radio devices. The mechanisms that work well for wireless mobile ad-hoc network prove to be redundant, and instead add to processing overheads in a static wireless factory setting. The thesis also presents work on the development and implementation of a new wireless routing protocol, Bluewave, which caters specially to wireless communication between machines in a factory setting.