Future industrial control/multimedia applications will increasingly impose orbenefit from wireless and mobile communications. Therefore, there is an enormouseagerness for extending currently available industrial communications networks withwireless and mobility capabilities. The RFieldbus European project is just one example,where a PROFIBUS-based hybrid (wired/wireless) architecture was specified andimplemented. In the RFieldbus architecture, interoperability between wired and wirelesscomponents is achieved by the use specific intermediate networking systems operatingat the physical layer level, i.e. operating as repeaters. Instead, in this paper we willfocus on a bridge-based approach, which presents several advantages. This concept wasintroduced in (Ferreira, et al., 2002), where a bridge-based approach was brieflyoutlined. Then, a specific Inter-Domain Protocol (IDP) was proposed to handle theInter-Domain transactions in such a bridge-based approach (Ferreira, et al., 2003a). Themajor contribution of this paper is in extending these previous works by describing theprotocol extensions to support inter-cell mobility in such a bridge-based hybridwired/wireless PROFIBUS networks.
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