ISA Louisville Industrial Wireless Networks

Industrial Wireless Networks

Presented by:    Cliff Whitehead -- Manager, Strategic Applications -- Rockwell Automation

Industrial wireless networks have gained a lot of attention in the trade press lately.  Much of the focus has been on the technology for low power wireless mesh networking.  Standards and practices have emerged to establish a means to promote consistency in the market, including the ISA SP100 (now known as ISA100) standard activity focused on a broad range of wireless applications.

Backed by the ISA Expertise, Heritage and History with nearly 30,000 members with 140 standards committees using an Open Standards Development Process accredited by ANSI, there are an estimated ~1 billion products in the market using ISA standards technologies.  ISA100 is being designed by experts in wireless, security, and instrumentation technologies with direct end users involvement on the committees.  ISA100 is guided by the following cornerstones:

Family of Standards: One-Stop Standardization

• Designed to Accommodate all your Plant Needs
• Areas of Coverage Identified to Date; Process Automation (Process Focus), Factory Automation (Discrete Focus), Transmission and Distribution (Long Distance Focus), RFID (Industrial Tagging Focus)

Universality: The Power of One

• Allows Deployment of a Single, Integrated Wireless Network
• Bring Simplicity to your Work with:
  • One Technology to Learn, Maintain and Operate
  • One Security System to Manage
  • One Set of Infrastructures

Co-Existence: Providing Peace of Mind

• Designed with Co-existence features
• Ensures Best Possible Performance

Today, a subcommittee of ISA100 known as .11a (ISA100.11a) is very actively involved in developing the standard for low power wireless mesh networking.  Four key performance criteria are guiding the efforts of the group:  Reliability, Latency, Throughput, and Security.

Upon release in 2008, ISA100.11a will include:

• Be an open standard for anyone to implement and deploy
• Be simple to use and deploy for end users
• Be focused on:
  • serving process industry applications without excluding factory automation
  • in-plant/near-plant
  • global deployment
• Provide technology to address Class 1 (non-critical) to Class 5 applications such as monitoring
• Assure multi-vendor device interoperability
• Include only 2.4 GHz 802.15.4-2006 radios
• Adhere to a comprehensive coexistence strategy
• Use channel hopping to support co-existence and increase reliability
• Use a single application layer providing both native and tunneling protocol capability for broad usability
  
   

Industrial Wireless Networks (continued)

• Provide simple, flexible, and scaleable security addressing major industrial threats leveraging 802.15.4-2006 security
• Offer field device meshing and star capability

From a user’s perspective, industrial wireless communication extends beyond the ISA100.11a discussion to include applications such as Tracking/Tracing, Mobility, Locating, Access, Monitoring, and Control.

Wireless in Industrial Automation is here to stay and is going to continue to grow.  Good planning and design will be critical to a successful wireless installation – even more so than a wired installation.  End Users will find new applications for wireless technology that we haven’t even conceived of yet.  As more devices are brought on-line because of the attractive ROI of wireless technology, the burden will rest on the applications that demand the data; so data management will be the next critical link in the automation and information chain.

Information in this presentation was provided by ISA100 and Rockwell Automation.

Contact Cliff: cjwhiteheadjr@ra.rockwell.com