Doctoral Committee:

Fieldbus communication systems have become a common solution to the problem of interconnecting sensors, actuators and control devices in manufacturing automation and process control applications. Recently, there has been an enormous eagerness to extend fieldbus functionalities to support wired and wireless network stations in the same network. This thesis addresses the proposal of a novel architecture for a hybrid fieldbus communication system, where wired and wireless transmission media coexist. The RFieldbus European project was one major effort towards a hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus solution. Although some of the achievements could potentially be applied to other commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) standard fieldbuses, most of the effort in that project was devoted to an actual implementation over PROFIBUS (acronym for PROcess FIeld BUS) technologies. In our opinion, the arguments that were put forward in favour of using PROFIBUS as the federating communication system for such architecture are still valid. In RFieldbus, the interconnection of wired and wireless stations is based on interconnecting devices operating at the Physical Layer level (as repeaters). In this thesis, w