Available online at www.sciencedirect.

com

ScienceDirect
Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234

2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Intelligent Sensors, IRIS 2016, 17-20
December 2016, Tokyo, Japan

Energy Consumption Analysis of WirelessHART Adaptor for

Industrial Wireless Sensor Actuator Network
Tran Duc Chunga , Rosdiazli Ibrahima,∗, Vijanth Sagayan Asirvadama,b , Nordin Saada ,
Sabo Miya Hassana
a Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia
b Centre for Intelligent Signal and Imaging Research (CISIR), Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, 32610, Bandar Seri Iskandar, Perak, Malaysia

Abstract
The fast development of the emerging industrial wireless protocols and technologies such as WirelessHART has enabled their use
in industrial sensing application. Their control application is still limited to mainly research environment. Apart from stringent
requirement of reliability, energy consumption (or battery’s life-time) of field device is also a decisive concern for control in
wireless sensor actuator network (WSAN). The key challenge for the battery is to have an operational life between four to ten
years. However, recent works have not addressed this necessity from electronic design and control perspectives. Therefore, this
paper presents an analysis of a designed WirelessHART adaptor emphasizing on the battery’s life-time requirement.

©c 2017
2016Published
The Authors.
by Elsevier B.V.by
Published Elsevier
This B.V.access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
is an open
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Intelligent
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review
Sensors under
(IRIS responsibility of organizing committee of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Intelligent
2016).
Sensors(IRIS 2016).
Keywords: Battery; Life-time; WirelessHART; Adaptor; WSAN

1. Introduction

The most widely used communication protocol in the industries is the highway addressable remote transducer
(HART) which has been developed since the 1980s 1 . Using this technology for process plant results in high costs of
cable installation, maintenance and troubleshooting. This prompted the fast pace development of wireless technolo-
gies which culminated in the introduction of WirelessHART standard in 2007 2 . In 2010, the standard was recognized
as the first international standard for wireless communication for industrial monitoring and control applications 3,4,5,6 .
One prominent advantage of the standard is its backward compatibility with the legacy HART protocol used in more
than 30 million field devices internationally 7,8 . It has significant field-proven records and is preferred for adoption in
industries 9 . Despite the standard’s advantage of backward compatibility with wired HART devices, a wireless adaptor
is needed to fully make a wired device wireless operable.

∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +6-05-368-7800 ; fax: +6-05-365-7443.

E-mail address: rosdiazli@petronas.com.my (Rosdiazli Ibrahim)

1877-0509 © 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer-review under responsibility of organizing committee of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Robotics and Intelligent Sensors(IRIS 2016).
doi:10.1016/j.procs.2017.01.215
228 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234

Nomenclature

C battery’s capacity
d(i, j) distance between source and destination nodes
ΔV at most voltage drop on battery to operational voltage of MCU
Et transmitting energy
Er receiving energy
Eelec energy to maintain transceiver circuitry
Eamp energy to amplify signal
Ebat usable battery’s energy
Eelect circuit active energy in transmitting
Eelecr receiving modes
Etra energy for transceiver to transmit
Erec receive signals
Es overall circuit sleep energy
Eelecs circuit sleep energy, equaled to standby energy of transceiver plus sleep energy of MCU
m distance exponential coefficient
n transmitting current coefficient
PmA value of transceiver current in transmitting mode
Prs settling power in receiver
Pts transmitter modes
tr receiving
tt transmitting time
Ts update period
T li f e battery’s estimated life-time
KP proportional gain
KI integral gain
KD derivative gain

In a WSAN, it is more important to conserve the battery capacity and extend its life-time than optimizing perfor-
mance matrics 10 . This is because one of the crucial requirements to make an adaptor acceptable by industries is the
ability to self-operate with a battery for up to four to ten years 11 . Recent related works have discussed on battery’s
life-time and energy consumption of several wireless adaptors 11,12,13 . However, the analysis with respect to different
operating conditions such as update period and sensor, actuator configuration of the WSAN was not provided. Hou
and Zheng 14 studied battery’s energy consumption on packet-base which is different from the time-base e.g., time di-
vision multiple access 15 used in job scheduling for WirelessHART devices. On the other hand, the drawback of such
approach is that it did not take into account the power consumption with regards to the prescheduled update period of
the electronic circuit 16 . Therefore, this paper presents an approach to estimate battery’s life-time of a designed wire-
less adaptor and suggestions to optimize its operating condition to meet the critical industrial life-time requirement.
This approach takes into account different update periods of the adaptor, and power consumption for both electronic
circuit and communication activities.
The remaining of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents the proposed adaptor design with the
selection of suitable components; Section 3 outlines power and energy consumption analysis of the adaptor; Section
4 presents results and analysis and finally, the conclusion is drawn in Section 5.
 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234 229

2. Proposed Adaptor Design

2.1. Adaptor Requirements

Apart from being a native device, each wireless adaptor is required to have the capability of interfacing with
the legacy HART-based instrument to ensure the backward compatibility of the protocol. In addition, the wireless
transceiver must operate at 2.4 GHz frequency in the industrial, scientific, and medical radio (ISM) band as specified
in the WirelessHART standard. The expected life-time is between four to ten years at typical update period of 8 s 11 .
This should be achievable with 3 V of operational voltage of the circuit and 3.6 V of the nominal voltage of battery.
These features and requirements are summarized in Table 1.

Table 1: Field adaptor’s proposed features and requirements.

Item Requirement
Battery’s Life-time 4 - 10 Years @ Update Rate: 8s
Battery Nominal Voltage 3.6 V
Circuit Power Supply DC
Circuit Supply Voltage 3.0 V & Below
Device Interface 1x HART to Interface with Legacy HART Instrument, 1x WirelessHART 2.4 GHz

2.2. Component Selection

Based on the requirements in Table 1, Table 2 outlines a list of main components that are selected for development
of the adaptor.

Table 2: Field adaptor’s proposed features and requirements.

Device Item Typical Note

Transceiver Idle Power Down, Standby-I, Standby-II 900 nA, 26 μA, 320 μA Standby-I Recommended
Transmit 0, -6, -12, -18 dBm 11.3, 9, mA, 7.0 mA 1, 0.2512, 0.0631, 0.0158 mW
Transmit Settling 8 mA 130 μs
Receive 250 kbps 12.6 mA WirelessHART Rate
Receive Settling 8.9 mA 130 μs
MCU Run, Low-power Run 140 μA/MHz, 8 μA 0 μs Wakeup
Sleep, Low-power Sleep 37 μA/MHz, 4.5 μA 0.36 μs Wakeup
Stop With, Without RTC 1 μA, 0.4 μA 3.5 μs Wakeup
Standby With, Without RTC 0.85 μA, 0.29 μA 50 μs Wakeup
DS8500 Typical Current Consumption 285 μA

The three most important components that need to be carefully chosen because they contribute to the majority
of power consumption of the adaptor, are (i) radio transceiver, (ii) microcontroller (MCU), and (iii) HART modem.
The selected radio transceiver is a single-chip, ultra-low power consumption nRF24L01+ IC operating at the ISM
band with maximum data rate of 2Mbps 17 . The chosen MCU, STM32L051x6 18 , also supports ultra-low power
consumption applications suitable for wireless sensor network (WSN). The MCU offers dynamic power supply with
three voltage levels: 1.8 V, 3.0 V, and 3.6 V. Additionally, it has internal voltage regulator that regulates the supplied
voltage to MCU dynamically. This feature provides a range of options for electronic design engineers to consider
and select an operational mode and a voltage level that best fit their specified applications. The HART modem for
interconnecting wired device with the wireless adaptor is DS8500 19 which is certified by FieldComm Group, the
merger of Fieldbus Foundation and the HART Communication Foundation. The identified power supply for the
adaptor is a pack of five parallel heavy duty, low self-discharge, wide operating temperature range and prolong life-
time LS 33600 batteries from Saft 20 . The battery is made of lithium-thionyl chloride which is suitable for industrial
applications 11 . The nominal voltage and capacity of each battery are 3.6 V and 17.0 Ah respectively. While the
230 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234

selected MCU’s operating voltage is 3.0 V. This is to ensure there is a suitable voltage difference between the power
supply and the circuit for reliable operation of the adaptor.

3. Energy Consumption Analysis

In order to guarantee reliable communication, Standby-I idle mode is recommended to be used for the transceiver
as shown in Table 2 17 . The MCU has several modes of operations with different power consumptions. In the Run
mode, the MCU fully functions at its peak of performance. In Low-power Run mode, both clock frequency and
number of enabled peripherals are limited. In Sleep mode, only CPU is powered off, several peripherals can maintain
their operations and can wake the CPU up from Sleep mode using an interrupt. Whereas, in Low-power Sleep mode,
both clock frequency and number of enabled peripherals are limited. In Stop and Standby modes, the MCU needs to
be activated from external event. Specifically for Standby mode, data in RAM and register will be lost. Thus, they are
not recommended to be activated as the wireless adaptor needs to maintain very high reliable communication. As for
transceiver power consumption, (1) shows a commonly used transceiver energy consumption model 21 .

Et = Eelec + Eamp ∗ d(i, j)m

(1)
Er = Eelec

Because the selected transceiver the receiving current is higher than the transmitting current, the model in (1) is not
valid as it will result in higher transmitting energy. The transmitter power reflects the range of communication it can
effectively broadcast messages to other wireless nodes. Therefore, this paper proposes a transceiver energy model per
update period, an interval between two consecutive updates, as follows.

Et = Eelect + Etra ∗ PnmA

Er = Eelecr + Erec (2)
E s = Eelecs

The main difference between (1) and (2) is that the model in (2) is more general and reflects well the operation of
the transceiver. Additionally, the distance coefficient in (1) has been replaced by the transmitting current in (2) which
is a physically controllable parameter of the transmitter. It is dependent on the preset transmit power of the transmitter.
The operational state diagram of the transceiver is presented in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1: Transceiver operational state diagram after power-up.

As seen from the figure, after powering-up, the transceiver will be in Standby-I mode. Whenever, there is a need to
transmit or receive, the transceiver will need to change its state to RX settling or TX Settling for a short period. Then
the transceiver will be in ready for receiving or transmitting data (in RX Mode or TX Mode respectively). Once the
operation finishes, the transceiver changes its state back to Standby-I. Hence, in order to complete either a transmitting
or receiving operation, the transceiver must go through an intermediate (i.e., Settling) state, for which, in the worst
case, lasts for trs = tts = 130 μs. Thus, the transmitter and receiver energy consumption are modelled as
 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234 231

Etra = Pts tts + Pt tt

Erec = Prs trs + Pr tr
Eelect = (Pds + Pmcua )(tts + tt ) (3)
Eelecr = (Pds + Pmcua )(trs + tr )
Eelecs = (Pds + Pmcus + Ptrans )t s
The sleep time is calculated based on the preset update period of the wireless adaptor.

t s = T s − (trs + tr + tts + tt ) (4)

In WirelessHART, the communication between controller and wireless adaptor is strictly within 10ms timeslot 3 .
Therefore, in worst case, the communication is assumed to take place during the entire timeslot. The transmitter and
receiver roles are similar, thus, maximum allowable communication time for each role is tr + trs = tt + tts = 5 ms. The
overall battery’s life-time [years] of the adaptor can be estimated using (5).
Ebat 3600CΔV 1
T li f e = T s = Ts (5)
Etra + Erec + Eelect + Eelecr + Eelecs Etra + Erec + Eelect + Eelecr + Eelecs 365x3600

4. Results & Analysis

4.1. Board Design

The schematic of the proposed wireless adaptor is presented in Fig. 2. All components used for developing the
adaptor are mainly surface mounted. The board is divided into several areas to represent the different functionalities
such as USB interface, MCU, temperature sensor, 2.4 GHz transceiver, power supply and HART modem. The fol-
lowing section studies the board’s energy consumption and its correlation with control performance of an industrial
process plant.

5
32 MHz 16 MHz 8 MHz 4 MHz
4
Life-time (Years)

0
0.5 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512
Ts(s)

Fig. 3: Estimated battery’s life-time of the designed wireless adaptor.

Fig. 2: Proposed wireless adaptor design.

4.2. Battery’s Life-time

Based on energy model in (2) (with n = 0, for simplicity), (3), (4), and (5), the estimated life-time of the battery
for the designed adaptor is presented in Fig. 3. When operational frequency of the MCU reduces, overall battery’s
life-time significantly increases. At 32 MHz, the life-time is limited to only 1 year, while at 4 MHz, its value reaches
up to 4 years as desired by industries. When the update period is longer, the life-time gradually increases and follows
a square root function pattern. The battery’s life-time is stable at update periods of 1s, 2s, 4s, and 8s for the respective
frequencies 4 MHz, 8 MHz, 16 MHz and 32 MHz. In order to meet the industrial requirement for battery’s life-time,
the suitable update period for plants should be from 4s, and the operating frequency of the MCU can be set to 4 MHz.
232 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234

4.3. Adaptor’s Energy Model Parameter Estimation and Evaluation

For providing a reference energy consumption model, the parameters in (2) are estimated based on the most suitable
operational frequency of the MCU at 4 MHz. This yields the longest life-time for the adaptor given the selected battery.
The parameter estimation is based on least squared error approach. As a result, the estimated parameters are presented
in Table 3. It is observed that Eelect is equal to Eelecr . This is based on the assumption made at the end of Section 3
that the maximum transmitting and receiving time are equal. The estimated transmitting current coefficient, n = 0.05,
is close to its presumed value of 0 in Section 4.2. The value of Erec is 10 % higher than that of Etra due to the reason
that the receiving current is 10 % higher than the maximum transmitting current as in Table 2.

Table 3: Estimated energy consumption parameters in model (2).

Eelect Eelecr Etra Erec n

0.0127 mJ 0.0127 mJ 0.1682 mJ 0.1876 mJ 0.05

Table 4 presents the relationship between circuit sleep energy, Eelecs , and the update period T s . It can be seen that
the value of circuit sleep energy increases as the update period is longer. Thus, the expansion in update period helps
to lengthen the battery’s life-time, however, it is not without a price of increasing circuit sleep energy at the similar
rate of close to 2. This results in the battery’s life-time saturation effect presented in Fig. 3.

Table 4: Eelecs as a function of update period T s .

T s (s) 1 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256 512

Eelecs (mJ) 1.3623 2.7402 5.4942 11.0022 22.0182 44.0502 88.1142 176.2422 352.4982 705.0102

4.4. Adaptor Configured as Sensor and Actuator

It is important to assess the potential effects of using the adaptor as a sensor and as an actuator in a closed-loop
wireless control. Thus, the system under consideration is a typical industrial liquid level control with time constant of
30s [4]. The plant model is presented in (6). The PID controller for the plant is auto-tuned using robust response time
tuning method to have the following optimal parameters: KP = 1.139, KI = 0.074, KD = −8.206.

1
P(s) = (6)
30s + 1
The responses of the system to each configuration of the adaptor subject to three suitable update periods of 1s,
8s, 16s are presented in Fig. 4. It can be observed that when the adaptor is used as an actuator, the response of the
system is more abrupt as compared to when it is used as a sensor. This is because, at the same update period, when the
adaptor is used as a sensor, the control signal is continuous hence smoother. In contrast, when the adaptor is used as
an actuator, the control signal is fixed to a certain value after it is executed. The same actuator signal is used until new
control signal is generated. Therefore, this leads to unchanged control signal over the entire update period, making
the system’s response not as smooth as if it were used as a feedback sensor.
The control performance of the system under different update periods with two configurations of the adaptor is
presented in Table 5. In the table, it can be seen that when the adaptor is operated as sensor, the integral absolute
error (IAE), and percent overshoot is lower than when it is operated as actuator. Thus, the settling time for the system
with the adaptor configured as sensor is shorter than that of the system with the adaptor configured as actuator. The
exception is at update period of 1s which is considered as significantly small as compared to the process time constant
of 30s. It is seen that the longer the update period, the higher the error rate and percent overshoot in the responses of
the system. The most affected control performance parameter is the percent overshoot. Its value increases with the
 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234 233

1.2 1.2

1 1

0.8 0.8
Output

Output
0.6 0.6

0.4 Set point 0.4 Set point

1s 1s
0.2 8s 0.2 8s
16s 16s

0 0
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 0 100 200 300 400 500 600
Time (s) Time (s)
(a) Adaptor is used as a sensor. (b) Adaptor is used as an actuator.

Fig. 4: Effect of adaptor’s configuration on responses of closed loop control system.

Table 5: Control performance subject to adaptor’s different update periods and configurations.

Ts 1s 8s 16s
Sensor Actuator Sensor Actuator Sensor Actuator
IAE 368.5632 373.6183 367.3067 388.2383 396.3142 481.5543
Settling Time 478.5765 478.8256 502.5431 503.8268 509.9888 513.7713
% Overshoot 7.2000 7.2000 8.7000 8.7800 18.1100 19.8100
Peak 1.0720 1.0720 1.0870 1.0878 1.1811 1.1981

expansion of the update period, i.e., from 7.2% to close to 20%. The least affected control performance parameter is
the settling time ranging between 478s and 513s.
The trade-off between energy consumption of the adaptor and the control performance of the system is presented in
Fig. 5. When update period expands from 1s to 8s, the energy consumption significantly decreases. As observed, there
is insignificant difference between energy consumption at update periods of 8s and 16s. This makes the battery’s life-
time of the adaptor falls into the saturation region as presented in Fig. 3. Contrarily, the trend of control performance
decreases when the update period grows from 1s to 16s. Significant increases in IAE, settling time and percent
overshoot are observed when comparing these at update periods of 1s and 16s.

0.8
Normalized Value

0.6
Energy Consumption
IAE Sensor
0.4 IAE Actuator
Settling Time Sensor
Settling Time Actuator
0.2
OS Sensor
OS Actuator

0
1 8 16
Ts(s)

Fig. 5: Adaptor’s energy consumption and control performance.

234 Tran Duc Chung et al. / Procedia Computer Science 105 (2017) 227 – 234

5. Conclusion

In conclusion, this paper has presented an energy consumption and battery’s life-time analysis of a designed Wire-
lessHART adaptor. In addition, the suitable adaptor’s operational frequency has been recommended to achieve the
desired industrial life-time requirement. The control performance of a closed-loop WSAN has been assessed for two
settings of the adaptor as sensor and actuator at different update periods. The switching of the adaptor’s setting from
sensor to actuator will result in significant IAE and overshoot increases. The increase of update period can reduce the
adaptor’s energy consumption, thus lengthening its battery’s life-time. However, this results in degradation of control
performance. Furthermore, the battery’s life-time will saturate as the update period increases due to the increase of
circuit sleep energy at similar rate. Future work would be assessment of the adaptor with real-world experiment.

Acknowledgements

The authors appreciate the support of Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP) for the funding of Yayasan UTP
grant no.: 0153AA-A74 to carry out this research.

References

1. Powell, J., Vandelinde, H.. Catching the Process Fieldbus - An Introduction to PROFIBUS for Process Automation. Momentum Press;
2013.
2. Zand, P., Mathews, E., Havinga, P., Stojanovski, S., Sisinni, E., Ferrari, P.. Implementation of wirelesshart in the ns-2 simulator and
validation of its correctness. Sensors 2014;14(5):8633.
3. IEC, . Industrial Communication Networks - Wireless Communication Network and Communication Profiles - WirelessHART¢. International
Electrotechnical Commission; 1.0 ed.; 2010.
4. Chung, T.D., Ibrahim, R., Asirvadam, V.S., Saad, N., Hassan, S.M.. Internal model control for industrial wireless plant subject to
measured round trip delays. In: 2016 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Proceedings. 2016, p.
1–6. doi:10.1109/I2MTC.2016.7520413.
5. Hassan, S.M., Ibrahim, R., Saad, N., Asirvadam, V.S., Chung, T.D.. Setpoint weighted wirelesshart networked control of
process plant. In: 2016 IEEE International Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference Proceedings. 2016, p. 1–6.
doi:10.1109/I2MTC.2016.7520440.
6. Chung, T.D., Ibrahim, R.B., Asirvadam, V.S., Saad, N.B., Hassan, S.M.. Simulation of wirelesshart networked control system with packet
dropout. In: Control Conference (ASCC), 2015 10th Asian. 2015, p. 1–6. doi:10.1109/ASCC.2015.7244389.
7. Found., H.C.. WirelessHART - The first Simple, Reliable and Secure wireless standard for process monitoring and control. HART Commun.
Found.; 2.0 ed.; 2009.
8. Chung, T.D., Ibrahim, R.B., Asirvadam, V.S., Saad, N.B., Hassan, S.M.. Adopting ewma filter on a fast sampling wired link contention in
wirelesshart control system. IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement 2016;65(4):836–845. doi:10.1109/TIM.2016.2516321.
9. Nixon, M.. A Comparison of WirelessHART and ISA 100.11a. Emerson Process Management; 2012.
10. Ad-atma: An efficient mac protocol for wireless sensor and ad hoc networks. Procedia Computer Science 2015;52:484 – 491.
doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.021.
11. Blevins, T., Chen, D., Nixon, M., Wojsznis, W.. Wireless Control Foundation - Continuous and Discrete Control for the Process Industry.
International Society of Automation; 4 ed.; 2015.
12. Nawaz, F., Jeoti, V.. Performance assessment of wirelesshart technology for its implementation in dense reader environment. Computing
2016;98(3):257–277. doi:10.1007/s00607-015-0462-9.
13. Verma, V.K., Singh, S., Pathak, N.P.. Optimized battery models observations for static, distance vector and on-demand based routing
protocols over 802.11 enabled wireless sensor networks. Wireless Personal Communications 2015;81(2):503–517. doi:10.1007/s11277-014-
2141-0.
14. Hou, R., Zheng, M.. Packet-based nonlinear battery energy consumption optimizing for wsns nodes. IEICE Electronics Express 2014;
11(9):20140167–20140167. doi:10.1587/elex.11.20140167.
15. Saifullah, A., Xu, Y., Lu, C., Chen, Y.. End-to-end communication delay analysis in industrial wireless networks. IEEE Transactions on
Computers 2015;64(5):1361–1374. doi:10.1109/TC.2014.2322609.
16. Hou, R., Chen, Y., Xing, G.. Path selection for optimizing nonlinear battery energy consumption. IEICE Electronics Express 2013;
10(22):20130689–20130689. doi:10.1587/elex.10.20130689.
17. Semiconductor, N.. nRF24L01+ Single Chip 2.4 GHz Transceiver. Nordic Semiconductor; revision 1.0 ed.; 2008.
18. STMicroelectronics, . STM32L051x6 STM32L051x8 - Access line ultra-low-power 32-bit MCU ARM-based Cortex-M0+, up to 64 KB Flash,
8 KB SRAM, 2 KB EEPROM, ADC. STMicroelectronics; docid025938 rev 4 ed.; 2014.
19. Maxim Integrated Products, I.. DS8500 HART Modem. Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.; rev 1; 2/09 ed.; 2009.
20. Saft, . Saft lithium batteries - Selector guide. Saft; 54083-2-0515 ed.; 2015.
21. Gao, D., Liu, Y., Zhang, F., Song, J.. Data aggregation routing for rechargeable wireless sensor networks in forest monitoring. Wireless
Personal Communications 2014;79(1):773–788. doi:10.1007/s11277-014-1886-9.