ISA 2012 Automation Week
Track: Wireless
Tuesday, 25 September, 3:15-4:45 pm, Room 205A
Sarah Prinster
Apprion
Wireless technology is providing significant improvements to safety, security, efficiency, productivity, and automation within the manufacturing industry. Frequently, the cost benefits of using wireless are clearly understood, however, there is no one type of wireless technology that solves all problems. In order to maximize the value of industrial wireless networking investment, companies must be able to select the best technology for a given application.
In order to achieve the necessary scalability, security, and interoperability of a “best of breed” wireless infrastructure, users must develop a common framework and architecture for all types of RF communications to work within. When designed properly, this architecture creates a common wireless infrastructure that crosses functional departments and conditionally supports multiple applications of differing criticality. In order to do so, this framework must:
- Align technology with business objectives and priorities
- Enable a vendor neutral operating environment
- Leverage and extend legacy systems
- Support open standards
- Provide effective technology lifecycle management capabilities to assimilate emerging technology
- Distribute intelligence, policy, and management into the network
Although wireless is heralded as the next big thing in automation, it is not new. What has changed is the emergence of products, applications, and standards to address the specific challenges for using wireless in large manufacturing facilities. By extending the range and lowering the costs of plant and process network communications, wireless network technology offers a tremendous opportunity to realize significant improvements in the overall efficiency of the plant. Operators in the field are now able to see the control system and review standard operating conditions, procedures, and corrective actions in real-time as they make field adjustments.
Security departments are using wireless as a means to improve security and achieve timely compliance with increasing regulations by wirelessly adding video monitoring, along with improved access control and intrusion detection. Other technologies and applications such as voice over IP wireless communications and asset tracking use wireless to enable productivity gains that have already been realized in many industries.
As the list of wireless applications grows, so do the number of wireless devices and systems that support these applications. This application growth adds complexity from using multiple wireless technologies to address each applications’ specific requirements for coverage, latency, and throughput.
Most wireless systems have been designed to use public frequencies, which are shared across the different technologies and applications. The frequency sharing is made easier by the emergence of robust standards for communications, but standards alone are not enough. Standards assure the proper function of the systems with a given set of cost/performance characteristics, and a basis for interoperability—but no single wireless technology or standard is capable of being the single solution for every application.
This diversity of cost/performance trade-offs among these and the dozens of other available industrialized wireless networking technologies dictates that users choose the most effective technology and devices for a given application. There is not a “one-size-fits-all” wireless networking technology that adequately supports the diverse and demanding requirements of industrial applications and environments. The laws of physics dictate that it is extremely unlikely that there will be such a powerfully flexible wireless technology anytime in our future.
Understanding that our airwaves should be considered a “standard” asset that must be allocated, monitored, and controlled to assure success of all wireless applications across all bands for all users and systems is critical for managing the wireless spectrum and implementing the proper wireless infrastructure is essential for continued performance.
