solutions engineering
Standards Will Fuel the Spread of Wireless Network Technologies Wireless products and technology for sensing and control applications have become a reality, and the widespread adoption of wireless technology is only a matter of time. For that to happen, product integrators require technology standards to provide product interoperability, a large body of knowledge and development sources, second sourcing and flexibility.
by Niek Van Dierdonck GreenPeak
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Wireless Sensors
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he average home user has fifty light Application switches in the home; a facility manEmbedded Software ager receives a daily status update of all 10,000 lights in the large office buildNetwork Stack ing; an industrial plant operator receives Embedded Software an alarm that the mains power has failed and that the uninterruptible power supply Wireless Transceiver has commanded all heavy machinery to Hardware “Chip” switch to a safe state. All three examples are typical sensor and actuator cases: the home switch trigFigure 1 Basic architecture of a panies providing solutions now gers the home light, the office building wireless sensor device. ration into products, technologies and companies. Whether your goal is to research the latest luminaries deliver a remote status report, lication Engineer, or jump to a company's technical page, the goal of Get Connected is to put you thewhatever factory power supply light. Of course reliability is important ice you require for typeuninterruptible of technology, the state of the machines. too, but an occasional second pressing of ies and products(UPS) you are changes searching for. In all three applications, devices commu- the switch to make the light turn on won’t nicate over a network. In all three applica- create a critical situation. tions, wireless communication can offer The situation is quite different in the a huge cost saving opportunity given the office building. The facility manager usuhigh installation costs of cable networks. ally guarantees a minimum service level Under the hood, however, the three to the building owner or occupant and applications are very different. In the relies on automation systems to perform home application the main drivers are maintenance tasks. Failing systems causlow cost and low power for the wireless ing a hiccup in the maintenance schedule switches and low cost for the wireless can have huge financial impact. Worse, an intruder switching off all lights of a large office building at 6 PM on a dark winter Get Connected day can cause panic and casualties: nothwith companies mentioned in this article. www.rtcmagazine.com/getconnected ing less than a terrorist attack. So reli-
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February 2008 Get Connected with companies mentioned in this article. www.rtcmagazine.com/getconnected
ability is essential in commercial building applications. Because commercial applications often have hundreds of devices running on batteries that will eventually fail and need costly labor effort to replace, low power is more critical in commercial applications than in the home. Industrial automation is probably even higher up on the reliability scale, even a slight glitch in a safety application might cause fatalities. On the other hand, industrial automation is usually less cost-sensitive than home and commercial building applications. These are only a few of the parameters that define the diversity of sensor applications. Other parameters include latency of the communication, the number of nodes in a network, the complexity it takes to install, commission and maintain a network, etc. It should come as no surprise that for such a diverse application space a “one-size-fits-all” strategy just does not work—not for the technology, nor for the wireless standards that specify how wireless technology works. Standardization organizations have understood that scoping is required to answer the vast diversity in requirements.