Battle for wireless connectivity supremacy

Industrial equipment begs to be connected. From sensors gathering critical process data and control devices managing the processes all the way to business servers managed by the IT department, data must be collected and managed. To get the data from one end of the system to the other, connections must be made. Industrial computers have always been connected in one fashion or another for this reason. What is exciting about this now is the number of efficient choices that make connections happen.

Fifteen years ago we were in the thick of the fieldbus wars. At one time, more than 50 competing fieldbuses, both open standard and proprietary, vied for implementation. Companies and trade associations lobbied their cause at every possible venue. Today that battle has settled down substantially to the point that only a handful of practical choices remain. It took many people years of efforts to reach this stage.

Wireless communications for industrial connectivity will experience the same challenge. Many competing wireless protocols are being deployed now, and it will take a while for these choices to go through the natural selection process.

Wireless technology has many benefits, including easy installation, few cables, portability, mobility, and wide coverage area. However, Radio Frequency (RF) has its own set of headaches, such as interference, noise, explosive environments, reliability, range, and performance. Many suppliers are using innovative technology to eliminate or reduce the headaches, but the solutions are fluid and dynamic at this stage. Thus, the solutions are coming quickly and in large quantities, many destined to be short-lived or specialized for selected uses and applications. This means many options will be available in the foreseeable future, making a single solution impractical.

Wireless technology developers are a creative lot. They work hard to eek out more performance, pushing to get maximum bandwidth out of a challenging medium and fighting for spectrum to squeeze in more channels. They are developing error checking and correcting protocols that enable wireless communications to work in the noisy RF environments often typical of industrial environments.

At the same time, power requirements constrain developers’ progress. They are not allowed to install high-power, point-to-point RF connections in most installations, so they must innovate ways to get the bandwidth today’s applications demand. Many of the devices they are connecting do not have much space or power available to an RF solution. Coverage challenges require repeaters and relays to be in place to expand coverage. RF reliability issues necessitate multiple paths to insure high levels of service for the rigorous demands of nonstop industrial processes.

Be sure to read the Market Pulse column by John Morse of IMS Research for another viewpoint on these wireless issues.

It will be interesting to watch all this unfold in coming years. Advances in wireless technology have always impressed me, and I am sure I will not be disappointed as even more currently unimaginable solutions appear.

Be ready for a long, drawn-out battle for the contenders in the wireless wars!

Jerry Gipper
Editorial Director

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