Deriving Test Procedures of Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks

Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) technologies are more widely applied in industrial applications, posing additional challenges for reliability due to harsh conditions. Efficient and manageable testing methods and tools to support building and maintaining reliable communication are inevitable though currently not so well existing. The goal of our work is to derive a systematic approach for testing LR-WPANs applicable in different contexts like operational and commissioning use. We define a set of faults and disturbances and a set of metrics indicating impacts of these. Further on we define Test Procedures for deriving specific targeted test sequences for detecting specific faults and disturbances, like detecting device failures or harsh traffic conditions. We also present some test examples and measurement results from field tests.