Publication date: 25 October 2011
Companies in just about every industry are looking to wireless technology to connect serial devices and avoid the high cost of installing cable. Low-cost wireless links reduce installation and maintenance costs and provide mobility. However, designing an effective wireless-networking solution requires an understanding of today’s complex wireless technologies, their benefits, and their trade-offs.
With wireless technologies becoming increasingly pervasive in the marketplace, companies may be looking to these as a key business driver for 2012. But before any investment is made, it’s important to take stock of the reasons for your businesses to go wireless in the first place. What technologies are currently available, where are they used, and what concrete benefits do they bring? In exploring this, the true value of wireless for your business can de determined, and the right purchase can be made.
Local Area Networks (LANs) run on wire cable. Wire is expensive to install and difficult to reconfigure for changes in the production environment. It does not allow for mobility, and there are certain places it simply cannot go. For instance, running cable throughout a factory floor is extremely difficult if not impossible. Because of these limitations, WLANs (wireless LANs) have become a hot commodity, revolutionising the way we work and do business today.
Data applications running over wireless networks can be found everywhere in our daily lives. They are particularly attractive to industries where certain functions are difficult to perform because of large areas, harsh operating conditions, or other restrictions.
As news of medical mistakes become more public, wireless applications are also becoming a key component in improving accuracy and quality of care in hospitals. Now hospital emergency-room doctors can examine a seriously injured patient, order x-rays, have the patient transferred to surgery, and receive the x-rays electronically in the operating room. In addition, physicians can remotely check a patient’s status, test results, medication schedules, or other information based on up-to-date entries made by nurses on their rounds. Quality of care improves dramatically as patient information is more accessible wirelessly and as more accurate information is recorded by immediate record keeping.
Retailers work in increasingly competitive environments, and as a result, are seeking ways to improve productivity, reduce costs, and generate incremental revenue. WLANs and the applications that run over them offer proven solutions. Popular examples include multimedia kiosks and self-service displays that employ audio, video, animation, and graphics to run point of sale (POS) and information applications. By improving the timeliness and flow of information, these wireless solutions lead to better overall customer satisfaction and increased profitability.
A major facility control centre had problems operating process-control equipment on a legacy network that was independent of the LAN. To network-enable all of the process control equipment at the support centre would have required more than 1,500 feet of wiring and conduit spanning multiple buildings, a costly and time-intensive project. Instead, wireless device servers have been integrated to
Ethernet-enable all of the equipment in the support centre. This solution also delivers significant time-savings, as over 500 PCs in the support centre have access to real-time information as it is generated by the process control equipment. This eliminates the need for a technician to patrol the floor and monitor each device individually, and speeds the response time when a failure occurs.
These examples prove that businesses of all types are finding that wireless networks meet the high availability and capacity requirements needed for their specific applications. Once a decision is made to deploy a wireless system, the overriding question then becomes one of standards.
Today’s popular wireless-networking standards are various and can prove very difficult to choose between. There are, however, important differences that are worth exploring in greater detail:
This is an unlicensed spectrum that has been commonly and traditionally used for portable phones, microwaves and wireless internet services.
Internationally, the 900 MHz band is widely used for Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile telephone systems or military communications. As a result, companies with sites around the globe cannot standardise on 900 MHz-based solutions for all locations. But the 900 MHz band suffers from a lack of interoperability, as vendors employ proprietary radio protocols. The industry, on the other hand, is moving towards standards-based systems, with multi-vendor support for common WLAN infrastructures. By contrast, Wi-Fi consumers are not restricted to a single vendor for upgrades and expansion of their WLAN systems.
In a mixed wireless network environment, it is important to select standards- based wireless products that are able to exchange and use information. Wi-Fi is a generic term that refers to any type of 802.11 network, the term is promoted by the Wi-Fi Alliance. Therefore, any products tested and approved as “Wi-Fi Certified®” by the Wi-Fi Alliance are certified as interoperable with each other, even if they are from different manufacturers. A user with a Wi-Fi Certified product can also use any brand of access point with any other brand of client hardware that is also Wi-Fi certified. Users benefit from this interoperability by not being locked into one vendor’s solution.
Named after the Viking, Harald Bluetooth, bluetooth is a short-range frequency-hopping protocol that links devices. Designed to operate in noisy frequency environments, bluetooth uses a fast acknowledgement and frequency-hopping scheme to make a link robust. It avoids interference from other signals by hopping to a new frequency after transmitting or receiving a packet. Compared with other systems in the same frequency band, bluetooth hops faster and uses shorter packets. As a short-range, low-cost, wireless solution, bluetooth requires less operating power than most other devices. However, because it shares a specific radio spectrum, there is potential for interference with consumer appliances that operate in the same spectrum, such as cordless phones, microwaves and baby monitors.
Over the past decade, wireless local area networks have played a key role in revolutionising the use of technology in our society. In the office and at home, and now across most business infrastructures, wireless connectivity is permeating every aspect of our lives. But as has been demonstrated, there are an abundance of complexities associated with wireless connectivity. The effort involved in understanding this technology and bringing it to embedded solutions can be daunting, time-consuming and expensive.
It is therefore important for organisations to seek out providers that can simplify the process. To capitalise on the growth in this space, they need a convenient, cost- effective, and easy-to-install solution for adding wireless connectivity to their embedded designs.
Finding a provider that offers the flexibility to suit specific wireless requirements, with the ability to add connectivity modules to any product quickly and easily, is an important place to start.
