Industrial Wireless: Top Technology for Reliability & Security

Overview

Past wireless deployments often failed in industrial and critical applications, leaving both designers and users with negative feelings about wireless technologies. Slower data rates meant the wireless connection was typically a bandwidth bottleneck, leading to slow and unreliable performance and often frustrated users. Multipath lead to unreliable connections due to the reflective nature of industrial environments Weak data encryption standards left the wireless connections vulnerable to attacks.

Today's wireless addresses all of these concerns in one way or another. Much higher data rates are now available, ensuring the wireless connection will not be a bandwidth concern. The MiMo functionality of 802.11n ensures reliable operation in the reflective environments of our industrial applications, ensuring reliable communications, as well as easing design in these environments in most cases. 802.11i now offers MUCH stronger data encryption, helping ensure secure reliable communications. And, as one would expect with a standards-based securing solution, interoperability works very well in mixed vendor environments. But as data encryption is one piece of the security puzzle, the addition of management frame protection now offers protection against typical DoS attacks in wireless environments.

As wireless has also matured quite a bit in the last few years, so has peoples' knowledge of wireless, easing planning, deployment and troubleshooting.