Research Article Performance Evaluation of DDS-Based Middleware over Wireless Channel for Reconfigurable Manufacturing Systems Basem Almadani, 1 Muhammad Naseer Bajwa, 1 Shuang-Hua Yang, 2 and Abdul-Wahid A. Saif 3 1 Department of Computer Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia 2 Department of Computer Science, Loughborough University, Leicestershire LE11 3TU, UK 3 Department of Systems Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia Correspondence should be addressed to Muhammad Naseer Bajwa; g201203680@kfupm.edu.sa Received 9 February 2015; Revised 3 July 2015; Accepted 7 July 2015 Academic Editor: Rob Brennan Copyright © 2015 Basem Almadani et al. Tis is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Reconfgurable manufacturing systems (RMS) are rapidly becoming choice of production and manufacturing industry due to their quick adaptability to the ever-changing market demands while maintaining the quality and cost of the products. Such systems are usually decentralized in their monitoring and control and consist of heterogeneous components. Terefore, need arises for an interface that can mask the heterogeneity and provide smooth communication among these dissimilar components. Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a data-centric middleware standard based on Real-Time Publish/Subscribe (RTPS) protocol that fulflls the job of such interface in distributed systems. In this work, we present the idea of using DDS-based middleware over commonly used wireless channels like Bluetooth and Industrial WiFi to facilitate data communication in distributed control systems. A simulation model is developed to quantify various performance measures like latency, jitter, and throughput and to examine the suitability of aforementioned wireless channels in distributed monitoring and control environments. Te model explores various communication scenarios based upon a practical case study. Obtained results serve as an empirical proof of concept that DDS can ensure reliable and timely data communication in frm real-time distributed control systems using common wireless channels and ofer extensive control over various aspects of data transmission through its rich set of QoS policies. 1. Introduction Use of distributed control systems (DCS) has become quite ubiquitous in a variety of industries like oil refning, petro- chemical, food processing, cement production, pharmaceuti- cal, and so forth. Modern controllers have become powerful enough to collect data, make decisions, and issue commands on their own instead of routing the data to a master control unit as in centralized control systems. Te most prominent advantages of DCS are their fexibility, agility, adaptability, and no single-point-of-failure. However, this distributed control paradigm raises its own challenges that need to be addressed before optimum benefts could be harvested. One of these challenges is that DCS not only require I/O communication for every controller but also need horizontal (with other controllers on the same hierarchical level) and vertical (with other devices on diferent hierarchical levels) communication [1]. Another challenge is the heterogeneity [2] in various components used to constitute the DCS. Tese components, normally provided by diferent vendors, vary in their capabilities, data formats, mapping schemes, and I/O interfaces and, therefore, present a rather complex heterogeneous system to deal with. To facilitate the industrial control communication in DCS and mask the heterogeneity amongst the subsystems, various middleware technologies have been proposed over the last couple of decades. Among these are Web Services, CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture), Java RMI and OPC (OLE for Process Control), and so forth. Tese technologies can simplify the design signifcantly and inte- grate control devices despite their heterogeneity. However, these solutions lose their value in real-time environments Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks Volume 2015, Article ID 863123, 11 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2015/863123