Patent ID: 8428067

Claim:
A method comprising: receiving, at a first leaf node, a plurality of quality of service parameters associated with at least one quality of service class, the quality of service parameters further associated with an industrial control and automation system comprising a plurality of wireless internally-powered leaf nodes and a plurality of line-powered infrastructure nodes, the quality of service parameters being transmitted by a gateway node to at least one of the infrastructure nodes and then wirelessly transmitted to the first leaf node, the gateway node configured to convert the quality of service parameters from an Ethernet format to an IEEE 802.11 wireless protocol format; identifying, at the first leaf node, an emergency condition associated with the industrial control and automation system; selecting, at the first leaf node and based on the identified emergency condition, one or more quality of service parameters of at least one data message to be routed through a communication network associated with the industrial control and automation system; based on the plurality of received quality of service parameters and the one or more selected quality of service parameters, assigning at the first leaf node a specified quality of service class to the at least one data message; and communicating, from the first leaf node, the at least one data message with the assigned quality of service class to at least one of: one or more other leaf nodes and one or more infrastructure nodes in the communication network; wherein: the leaf nodes and the infrastructure nodes in the communication network operate according to a first quality of service policy; selecting the one or more quality of service parameters comprises selecting a second quality of service policy; the second quality of service policy identifies a priority for each of multiple types of data messages based upon a type of identified emergency condition and a recipient of information; and an operation of the gateway node and the infrastructure nodes is configured by an OLE for Process Control (OPC) server, the OPC server configured to distribute cryptographic security keys to the gateway node and at least one of the infrastructure nodes.