- By Jack Smith
- September 04, 2025
- Feature
Summary
Although the ISA100 Wireless standard has remained largely unchanged since its final version, recent advances have focused on safety-critical applications.
The International Society of Automation formed the ISA100 Committee in 2005 to establish standards, recommended practices and produce technical reports and related information for implementing wireless systems in the industrial automation and control environment with a focus on the field level. ISA-100.11a, the first project in the ISA100 family, addresses the performance needs of low-energy field devices used for periodic monitoring and process control where latencies on the order of 100 ms can be tolerated in constrained configurations. Mesh, star and hybrid network configurations are supported in scaled systems that in turn support various industrial internet of things (IIoT) applications.
Built from the ground up and driven by user requirements, the ISA100 Wireless standard received formal ANSI approval in January 2012 and approval as IEC 62734 and EN 62734 in September 2014. ISA100 Wireless is the only IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LowPAN) industrial protocol designed for industrial automation. It has remained largely unchanged since its final version, and has proven to be a mature, stable technology well-suited for industrial applications.
“ISA100 is both incredibly mature and stable (being an IEC standard since 2014), and is also maturing in ways that complement and grow the technology but don’t compromise the core protocol,” said Paul Hodge, global lead, Experion System Infrastructure Product Managed Team at Honeywell HPS and ISA100 Wireless Compliance Institute (WCI) vice chair. “New features that WCI has added, such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) along with OPC-UA, provide value-added configuration mechanisms and ways to access ISA100 data, but that doesn’t fundamentally change the underlying mature, reliable protocol.”
Recent advances have focused on expanding the application portfolio, with ISA-100 now being used for safety-critical applications such as gas detection, corrosion monitoring and valve control in addition to general monitoring and control. “The main evolution is the market acceptance of safety over wireless,” said Ådne Baer-Olsen, global business development lead for wireless safety at Dräger, one of the world’s largest suppliers of fixed fire and gas detection solutions. “This is now being used globally by many end users and combining this with process control gives a lot of flexibility to end users.”
Philippe Moock, former global director of the Thermal Insight Group at Armstrong International, added, “Over the past year, ISA100 Wireless technology has seen several significant advances aimed at improving interoperability, ease of deployment and integration with modern industrial systems. In addition to supporting BLE and OPC-UA, a key development is the integration of PA-DIM support, said Moock.
Further ISA100 technological advances include improved incorporation of IPv6 directly as part of its network layer and transport layer. IPv6, which stands for Internet Protocol Version 6, helps to identify and locate devices on the network. Interoperability and cybersecurity have been enhanced as well. ISA100 is now used for real-time device monitoring—such as steam traps, PRVs/SRVs and for safety or detection applications such as wireless gas and corrosion detection.
“For the last four or five years, ISA100 Wireless has increasingly been adopted in safety,” said Robert Assimiti, CEO at Centero. ISA100 Wireless was architected with safety applications in mind. “Various types of ISA100 Wireless field devices are engaged in mission-critical applications such as gas detectors, sounders and beacons that are deployed on-shore as well as off-shore. Safety integrated systems [SIS] are connected to safety controllers; the field devices are SIL2 [Safety Integrity Level 2]-certified and vendors are offering ISA100 SIL2-certified instruments.”
Assimiti added that other use cases such as corrosion monitoring and vibration monitoring used in predictive maintenance have also been picking up quite a bit in the last few years.
ISA100 wireless technology and WirelessHART
The explosive growth of wireless technology choices has made it hard to keep up with where ISA100 Wireless fits with WirelessHART and other technologies including LoRa, Wi-Fi, BLE and 5G industrial wireless (Figure 1).
“There’s no question that the abundance of protocols can be confusing,” Hodge said. “ISA100 serves a particular market segment. There might be those who might not need that segment. For example, they might not need frequent updates and thus LoRa may be more suitable. End users also may be confused by the range of choice for which there is no real direct comparison such as BLE, LoRa, 5G, etc.”
Moock said there is indeed ongoing confusion in the marketplace regarding ISA100 wireless, WirelessHART and other industrial wireless technologies. “This confusion stems from overlapping capabilities and varying levels of adoption across industries.”
Considering ISA100 wireless versus WirelessHART: “Confusion arises because both are marketed as ‘industrial wireless mesh networks’ for similar use cases, but they differ in architecture, flexibility and integration paths,” Moock explained. He also commented about ISA100 Wireless versus the other industrial wireless technologies: “These technologies are not direct competitors to ISA100 or WirelessHART but are often misunderstood as alternatives due to marketing or lack of technical clarity. Vendors often promote their preferred standard without clearly explaining how it fits into the broader wireless ecosystem. End users may struggle to understand which technology is best suited for their specific use case (e.g., safety, monitoring, control, analytics).
“There is limited outreach to educate the market on interoperability, coexistence and integration strategies,” Moock said.
Baer-Olsen said that the main challenge is that “we talk about wireless in the overarching sense that ‘all things wireless are the same.’ But these are tools to achieve success in widely different applications. ISA100 (Figure 2) and WirelessHART (Figure 3) seem to be linked the closest, but they have different specialties. WirelessHart was built to monitor and pass along messages that are not time-critical. They form sub-clusters and talk in mesh to ensure all messages get through. The messages get through in due time. First come, first served. [WirelessHart has] implemented burst messages to give some priority to time-critical messages, but not with a latency guarantee.
“Then comes ISA100, which also operates on 2.4 GHz and is also an industrial wireless standard. It can operate in a similar way as WirelessHART, using mesh and getting the messages through. But the main difference is the ability to tunnel foreign protocols such as Modbus, OPC and Profinet/ProfiSafe, which allows for more flexibility and the ability to achieve SIL2 level safety communication,” Baer-Olsen said.
Combined with excellent redundancy and full latency control, ISA100 can be used with ProfiSafe-enabled controllers in executive action functions, Baer-Olsen continued. “So far, this is the only international standard wireless industrial communication that can achieve this. The requirement for the network is then to be a star configuration with strict communication plans for the devices to ensure there is redundancy while ensuring a maximum two-hop communication,” he said.
LoRa is a wireless radio frequency technology that enables long-range, low-power communication between devices. “Like WirelessHART, it is very good for monitoring, but with perhaps 20 times the communication range at the cost of a lower amount of data,” explained Baer-Olsen. It is used for collecting data that does not need to be acted on instantly—for example, low-level gas monitoring to calculate emissions over time—and where there is no other infrastructure available.
“Bluetooth is a short-range communication that we would use to program field devices and download logs. It also could be used to collect data from edge devices like portable gas detectors when they pass Bluetooth gateways to read past and present states,” Baer-Olsen explained.
Comparing wireless technologies
Assimiti said that WirelessHART is in essence wired HART over wireless. “WirelessHART adapts the widely deployed wired HART protocol to wireless. You have the same commands and application layer structures augmented by wireless diagnostics and management parameters.
“It primarily depends on the Distributed Control System (DCS) or client applications end users have installed and are running on the plant network,” Assimiti continued.
According to Moock:
- ISA100 Wireless is more flexible and future-ready, especially for multi-protocol environments and digital transformation initiatives.
- WirelessHART is mature and widely adopted, especially in facilities already using HART-based instrumentation.
- Both are reliable and secure, but ISA100 offers greater architectural openness (mesh, duo cast, star) and integration potential with modern Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems.
Moock also compared ISA100 wireless technologies to LoRa, BLE, etc.:
- ISA100 Wireless is ideal for mission-critical industrial applications requiring reliability, flexibility and security.
- LoRa is great for long-range, low-power applications like environmental monitoring, but not suitable for real-time control.
- BLE is increasingly used for device provisioning and short-range sensing, especially in conjunction with other protocols.
- Wi-Fi offers high bandwidth but lacks the determinism and robustness needed for industrial control.
- 5G is promising for future industrial automation, especially with private networks, but adoption is still in the early stages.
Wrapping up
ISA100 is not the only wireless technology being adopted by industry. No single wireless technology performs best across all dimensions because there are some design tradeoff limitations among transmission data rate, transmission range, battery life (power consumption) and other factors.
The developers of the ISA100 standard were counting on the type of radio used to be available for a long time. The radio has not only been available for a long time, it has gotten a lot better over the last 15 years. The performance users are getting today from ISA100 is a lot better than it would have been 15 years ago.
This feature originally appeared in the August/September issue of Automation.com Monthly.
About The Author
Jack Smith is a senior contributing editor for Automation.com and Automation.com Monthly digital magazine, publications of ISA, the International Society of Automation. Jack is a senior member of ISA, as well as a member of IEEE. He has an AAS in Electrical/Electronic Engineering and experience in instrumentation, closed-loop control, PLCs, complex automated test systems and test system design. Jack also has more than 20 years of experience as a journalist covering process, discrete and hybrid technologies.
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