Influence of Wi-Fi computer interfaces on measurement apparatuses

Nowadays, low-power wireless technologies like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth, to cite a few, are often present in measurement environment. Sometimes, they can be considered as unwanted disturbances. Many times, they are used as communication medium to realize smart data transmission. Among them, Wi-Fi is the most widespread in the development of wireless local area networks (WLANs), and because of its good data transmission rates and plug-and-play capabilities, it is the main candidate for integrating measurement instruments in wireless networks. Although designed and developed to reduce at minimum its radiated emissions, Wi-Fi has to be considered as a potential interfering source for modern instrumentation that often has bandwidth and operating frequencies including the Wi-Fi band. For these reasons, a careful investigation on the electromagnetic susceptibility of measurement systems, when subjected to Wi-Fi, is carried out in this paper. Disturbance effects due to the Wi-Fi technology on typical measurement stations, including spectrum analyzers, digital oscilloscopes, universal counters, and digital multimeters, are analyzed. The achieved results prove that the effects of interferences due to the wireless module on modern instrumentation are often not negligible, thus potentially compromising its metrological performance and the measurement result reliability. © 2006 IEEE.