| Summary: | In recent years, the successful introduction of short-range wireless technology in both consumer and commercial markets has attracted considerable interest from designers of industrial plants and factories. Wireless technology can be used to achieve both flexibility and cost reduction when installed and utilized for industrial process control networks and factory automation systems. Effective application of wireless devices in industrial environments requires careful assessment of the potential uses for such devices, methods for characterizing the wireless channel, and accurate models for the impairments introducted by the wireless channel. Here, we show that: (1) Although conventional wireless technologies such as ZigBee and WiFi are currently used in many industrial applications, ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technologies offer unique capabilities that may lead to their playing key roles in future industrial applications. (2) Our computer-assisted technique for fitting the Saleh-Valenzuela model to measured UWB channel impulse responses (CIRs) offers a more rigorous and reproducable method for characterizing UWB channels than existing manual techniques can. (3) Although relatively little propagation data has been collected in indoor industrial environments to date, we combine these results to form a single rationalized UHF/UWB propagation model that is useful to designers and fills an important immediate need of designers while revealing gaps in our current understanding that need to be completed by future researchers.
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