TABLE OF CONTENTS Farid Dowla
Robert Poor
Existing wired methods of providing communications in a factory or industrial setting have numerous shortcomings:
Factory communication wiring can easily have an installed cost of $5 to $10 per foot. What if expensive communication wiring could be replaced with reliable wireless links?
Productivity programs demand more and more information from smart devices. What if industrial gear could gain more local intelligence by sharing information with nearby sensors?
More and more maintenance systems require remote data acquisition. What if it were possible to continually monitor the condition of all the equipment on the factory floor and predict failures before they happen, instead of locating them after the fact?
This chapter will describe various wireless approaches to factory and industrial communications.
An obvious problem that can be addressed with wireless solutions is simple wire replacement, where the radio frequency (RF) communication link emulates wire in an existing system. No changes are made to the system architecture. Rather, wireless links are used to transmit the same data that the physical wire once carried.
Consider an instrument connected by a serial cable to a control panel using Modbus as a communication protocol. Wireless RF links can replace the serial cable as the physical layer to carry Modbus packets back and forth, requiring no physical changes to the instrument, the control panel or the underlying software architecture. The serial cable is taken away, and a wireless transceiver is physically connected to the...
