Wi-HTest: Compliance Test Suite for Diagnosing Devices in Real-Time WirelessHART Network

WirelessHART was released in September 2007 and is the first open wireless communication standard specifically designed for real-time process control applications. It is designed to the same standards as its wired counterpart for reliability and interoperability. To ensure the compliance with the HART 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 designed 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 and fault data injection. 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, a representative test case is conducted for the purpose of demonstration. This test case in turn shows that Wi-HTest is a novel and efficient test suite for verifying the compliance of real-time WirelessHART devices.