NIST’s Industrial Wireless Systems Lab Adds Capability to Support IEEE Standards Effort

NIST’s Industrial Wireless Systems Lab is developing research testbed capabilities to support the IEEE standardization effort, P3388, the Standard for Radio Frequency Channel Specifications for Performance Assessment of Industrial Wireless Systems. The lab will provide measurement-based guidance for next generation wireless systems, deployed in harsh, mission-critical operational environments where wireless is used as a primary communications mode.

To support the development of the industrial wireless testbed and the IEEE standardization effort, NIST’s Industrial Wireless Team added a wireless reverberation chamber to be used in conjunction with scenarios, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and robotic and process control wireless connectivity scenarios where reliability and timeliness of information delivery are critical. The chamber allows testing and characterization of wireless devices in a shielded, repeatable, and accurate stochastic multipath environment. It is designed for over-the-air measurements in the mid-band wireless range of 2.4 to 7.125 GHz where multiple wireless technologies are deployed. These technologies include wireless local area networks (WLANs), 5G, Bluetooth, and the IEEE 802.15.4 industrial wireless protocols family.