Wireless Is the Wave of the Future
It is widely understood in the industrial world that relying on degrading, failing, or poorly configured systems leads to higher operating and maintenance costs. Well-designed wireless retrofits that comply with the emerging wireless standards will bring new levels of productivity, uptime, and overall superior performance to the generation industry. Wireless applications that transcend any specific industry segment are already being deployed.
For example, operator mobility is enhanced with handhelds and tablet personal computers that are wirelessly connected to plant control systems, allowing operators and maintenance personnel to roam their control room; wireless video adds process and plant security; and a host of new real-time location services for plant assets and people are just around the corner.
To take advantage of these emerging applications requires a secure and robust industrial wireless infrastructure. The latest technologies and emerging standards are enabling implementations in a highly secure and robust fashion across the enterprise. It’s critical that wireless communications — like any wired networking — be properly engineered, constructed, and maintained in order to perform reliably.
Maintaining a Wireless System
Once a secure and robust wireless infrastructure is constructed, it must be maintained and managed to keep it functioning correctly. Wireless networks, although offering huge savings versus their wired counterparts, by their very nature require more management. Maintaining security keys, responding to incidental or malicious interference, and managing rapidly changing technology and standards are just a few of the functions that require an expertise not necessarily available within the local IT organization of the typical power plant.
Many organizations are finding that it’s more cost effective and more secure to contract out the real-time management and optimization of their wireless infrastructure. Unfortunately, many organizations simply allow their wireless networks, which contain multiple technologies, protocols, and frequencies, to grow in an ad hoc fashion. That is a sure way to have an unsuccessful wireless experience.
The key to a fully functional wireless platform that can enable solutions, such as retrofitting existing instrumentation for PAM, is to engineer and manage those networks from the top down.
—Paul Sereiko (psereiko@gmail.com) is president of AirSprite Industrial Wireless LLC. He is also cochair of the ISA SP100 Marketing Working Group and member of the HART Communication Foundation.
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