Preprint! Submitted to: 2 nd . International Conference on Communications, Computing and Control Applications (CCCA), 6-8 Dec. 2012 Abstract – Despite of the disadvantages of wired IT infrastruc- tures, Ethernet-based communication devices have been common to operate in plant floor environments due to their high band- width and security aspects. As WiFi and ZigBee technologies become more mature, it will not be surprising to see WiFi inter- faces embedded in communication devices together with ZigBee and other interfaces in the near future by default. To leverage the co-existence of both technologies for improving the communi- cation performance between sensor nodes and backend systems, the authors propose an intelligent communication device inspect- ing the transmission quality and therefore avoiding connection loss and missing process data by using switching mechanisms between available wireless technologies. A prototype of this pro- posed system has been designed and implemented and extensive experiments in industrial environment have been conducted. The results show that the proposed system can achieve significantly higher network reliability and efficiency than common communi- cation interfaces running with only one wireless interface. Key Words: Prototyping platforms, embedded systems, sensor networks, wireless communication, switching mechanisms, I. INTRODUCTION odern production facilities are characterized by a high degree of automation. A real-time information flow is a prerequisite for efficient regulation and control sys- tems in production [11]. A lack of process data can lead to inadvertent process delays or interruptions. The basis for the prevention of process disturbances are highly available and reliable IT infrastructures. In the manufacturing industry users normally fall back on wired IT infrastructures. Wired IT infra- structures offer high bandwidth and reliable data transmission [2]. However, they bring with them a whole series of disadvantages, such as low degrees of freedom during plant planning phases [3], a complex installation, and an expensive and time-consuming maintenance. If a production system is insufficiently covered, contact wear or cable breaks can derail individual processes or lead to production stops in the worst case. Additionally the lack of flexibility of wired solutions is often problematic. If a manufacturing or production facility needs to be rebuilt or expanded, all cables must be adjusted or tightened, causing a high level of complexity and additional costs. Here, sufficient movement areas for mobile devices such as forklifts or industrial robots remain often unconsid- ered in the initial cable routing. Evolution of technologies has driven sensor networks away from their original appearance [6]. With the emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) approaches, most of current sensor networks consist of a collection of wirelessly interconnected sensors, each of which is embedded with sensing, computing and communication components [1]. Concerns with regards to availability, reliability and security of wireless solutions in production environments are one rea- son for the hesitation of the industry to invest so far in wire- less technologies. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: In Sec- tion II, the authors discuss some related works. Section III describes the methodology used. Sections IV and V describe the developed system prototype, the testing environment and the results, respectively. We conclude the paper and discuss some future extensions of the current prototype in Section VI. II. RELATED WORK There are several approaches and platforms available im- proving the performance of communication in industrial envi- ronment. In the recent years, some research has been con- ducted to study co-located interfaces to assist WiFi transmis- sion. Blue-Fi [8] uses the co-located Bluetooth only to predict the availability of WiFi connectivity. A similar approach, ZiFi [9], has been developed and utilizes ZigBee to identify the existence of WiFi networks and to coordinate the communica- tion activities of WiFi to reduce contention and collision. Unlike those approaches, this work focuses on the develop- ment of wireless communication devices providing more than one wireless interfaces and therefore able to ensure higher reliability and robustness. The fact that there is no co-existence of multiple wireless interfaces in the same device mainly for data transfer and ma- chine control inspires the authors of this article to develop new technique to address the above issue. III. METHODOLOGY A. Overview The problems mentioned above have been addressed during the European research project iReMo (intelligent reactive polymer composites moulding), funded by the European Sev- enth Framework Programme (FP7) over three years. The aim of the project (figure 1) was to make reactive closed compos- ite moulding an automatic, flexible and efficient industrial process by the development of process monitoring technolo- gies for the processing of liquid composite materials [13]. In Intelligent wireless communication devices for efficient data transfer and machine control Z. Ghrairi, K.A. Hribernik, C. Hans, K.-D. Thoben BIBA - Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH, Bremen, University of Bremen, Germany {ghr,hri,han,tho}@biba.uni-bremen.de M