WIDAGATE

Due to its cable-free deployment, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have drawn great attention as a new technique for industrial data acquisition. However, the harsh environment of the gas turbine engine provides a number of challenges to the deployment of wireless sensors, which represents an obstacle to WSN's deployment in safety-critical industrial instrumentation and automation.

With the purpose of de-risking the wireless data transmission technology in gas turbine engine testing, this project combines the latest advancements in wireless communication and agent-based computing to design, model, simulate and evaluate flexible and reliable wireless sensor networks for effective data acquisition in the harsh, dynamic and inaccessible environment of gas turbines.

A small-scale WSN testbed has been built and deployed in engine testing site at Rolls-Royce. We then investigate how small-scale tests of a WSN deployed on a real engine can be used to validate and improve the simulator platform. Based on the validated, realistic physical layer model, different MAC protocols are simulated to demonstrate how this improved simulator can be used to select an appropriate protocol for wireless data acquistion in engine testing.