A Perfomance Comparison of WirelessHART and ZigBee in Oil Refinery

Future Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies will be required to support highly reliable and lowlatency machine-type connectivity. In this article, we illustrate an experimental case study inside an industrial oil refinery plant and highlight a performance comparison between two popular industrial standards, namely the WirelessHART (WH), now standardized in IEEE 802.15.4e and ZigBee (ZB), based on IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer. The oil refinery is located in a tropical region that is subject to variable weather conditions. The paper introduces, at first, the experimental context and the deployment scenarios. Then, it gives a description of the collected measurements in the refinery and related comparative analysis based on common metrics, such as Successful Transmission Rate, RSSI, and Path Stability, among other parameters.