Abstract

Wireless instrumentation, defined as the merger of wireless sensor network (WSN) technologies and industrial process automation systems, has become increasingly popular in the process industries in recent years. WSN, the foundation for wireless instrumentation, is a rather new technology, with its origins tracing back to the early 1980s through the distributed sensor networks (DSNs) program at the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) of the US Department of Defense [1]. DSNs were imagined to consist of many spatially distributed, autonomous, and low-cost sensing nodes that collaborated to gather various information about their surroundings. However, in the 1980s, the technology was not quite ready for this application. The sensors were too large and expensive, and the communication was not yet associated with wireless connectivity.