Hardware Implementation and Testing of Reconfigurable RTU for Wireless SCADA Muhammad Aamir 1,2 • Muhammad Aslam Uqaili 2 • Nishat Ahmad Khan 3 • Javier Poncela 4 • B. S. Chowdhry 2 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract This paper presents implementation and testing of a remote terminal unit (RTU) design which is suitable for wide area operation essential for controlling and monitoring oil and gas sector, water and power industries. This particular implementation is based on field programmable gate array which confers reliability and reconfigurability properties to the RTU design. It has significant advantages resulting in a more powerful and optimized solution for execution of wireless based Supervisory control and data ac- quisition system. The main objective of this research work is to implement and verify a design considering performance parameters which assists in optimized development and inexpensive implementation of an RTU, also featured with wireless communication. It also includes behavioral modeling using integrated software environment web pack of XILINX for the purpose of testing functionality of developed RTU. Features of developed RTU are also compared with commercially available hardware considering its cost effectiveness. This particular design and implementation is made up of four major sections including analog input, digital input, digital output and communication interface module. & Muhammad Aamir muaamir5@yahoo.com Muhammad Aslam Uqaili aslam.uqaili@faculty.muet.edu.pk Nishat Ahmad Khan nisahmad@yahoo.com Javier Poncela javier@ic.uma.es B. S. Chowdhry c.bhawani@ieee.org 1 Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan 2 Mehran University of Engineering and Technology, Jamshoro, Pakistan 3 Advanced Engineering Research Organization, Karachi, Pakistan 4 ETSI Telecommunication Engineering, University of Malaga, Malaga, Spain 123 Wireless Pers Commun DOI 10.1007/s11277-015-2752-0