Abstract

As society becomes more reliant on the resources extracted in petroleum refinement the production demand for petrochemical plants increases. A key element is producing efficiently while maintaining safety through constant monitoring of equipment feedback. Currently, temperature and flow sensors are deployed at various points of production and 10/100 Ethernet cable is installed to connect them to a master control unit. This comes at a great monetary cost, not only at the time of implementation but also when repairs are required. The capability to provide plant wide wireless networks would both decrease investment cost and downtime needed for repairs. However, the current state of wireless networks does not provide any guarantee of reliability, which is critical to the industry. When factoring in the need for real-time information, network reliability further decreases. This work presents the design and development of a series of transport layer protocols (coined ENSURE) to provide time-sensitive reliability. More specifically three versions were developed to meet specific needs of the data being sent. ENSURE 1.0 addresses reliability, 2.0 enforces a time limit and the final version, 3.0, provides a balance of the two. A network engineer can set each specific area of the plant to use a different version of ENSURE based network performance needs for the data it produces. The end result being a plant wide wireless network that performs in a timely and reliable fashion.

Date of publication

Fall 10-18-2012

Document Type

Thesis

Language

english

Persistent identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10950/94

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