Coverage simulator for wireless networks

Abstract

Wireless communication is a necessity for today's industrial networking. There are important reasons supporting this affirmation. In flexible manufacturing there are a large number of mobile devices which need wireless control such as mobile robots, portables, autonomous vehicles. Also, enterprises like the idea of having the possibility of a fast and cheap network reconfiguration that can be provided thanks to wireless nodes. For the design of these systems in a particular factory or industrial plant, it is necessary to have measurement campaigns for different transmitter and receiver locations in order to determine coverage. The paper presents a simulator which computes these calculations automatically, providing money and time savings.