Showgoers at ISA EXPO got a chance to see first-hand demonstrations of how wireless standards work with applications during a tour sponsored by the Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance (WINA) on Wednesday.
Cliff Whitehead, manager of strategic application at Rockwell Automation, lead the tour, which featured presentations by WINA Vice President David Kaufman, director of business development at Honeywell, and WINA President Ian McPherson, vice president of solutions architecture at Apprion. They explained the basics of the ISA100 industrial wireless standard as well as several other wireless applications at various booths.
ISA100 is the emerging standard on wireless for the industry. ISA100.11a is the up-and-coming draft standard to be the first international standard on low-powered sensor network mesh, based on IEEE802.15.4. Other parts of the main standard are 100.12 on WirelessHART convergence; 100.14 on trustworthy wireless, security, and reliability; 100.15 on backhaul (getting data off the plant floor an into SCADA systems); and 100.21 on industrial asset tracking.
ISA100.11a is focused on process control and latency delays. “Were using techniques like frequency hopping to make sure radios can coexist,” Kaufman said. “The radio goes to sleep, either time-based (100 milliseconds) or event-based to preserve the battery life.”
The Wireless Compliance Institute makes the standard a reality. Quan Wang, a lecturer at Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications in Nan’an, Chongqing. P.R. China, gave a rundown of how instruments from different vendors actually use the standard using a demo he constructed as part of a research project.
Rares Ivan, a software engineer at NIVIS, explained how a list of field devices are connected to a backbone router. ISA100 uses mesh, which means multiple paths, to give devices a self-healing network, he said.
“With Apprion systems, members of WINA and the Wireless Compliance Institute each have different applications, but are able to use wireless and maintain security of different parts of the system,” McPherson said. “By understanding assets in the plant, a person in the plant or a camera in the field, we can help you decide what’s important, such as a high alarm for overflow at a tank farm,” he said.
“We’re the glue taking standard-based technology to compartmentalize and add value,” McPherson said. “We do engineering studies and work with users to define a road map. We can set a gateway pre-wire so standards can speak to the network.”
On-Ramp’s wireless sensor network delivers a breakthrough in metro-scale, enterprise, and in-building sensor monitoring and location tracking. The company’s ultra-link processing technology provides a more than 25x increase in range, capacity, and robustness with low-power performance.
Operating in the unlicensed ISM frequency bands, the network is comprised of small form factor nodes that communicate with an access point. This “breakthrough in sensitivity,” comes from modulating a signal “below the noise floor,” Fernandez-Silva said, “while simultaneously, thousands of sensors are talking on the same piece of software to a single access point.”
"With an Access Point located at the Marriott hotel a mile and a half away, and connecting to four wireless sensor nodes at the On-Ramp booth at ISA Expo, we do see a lot of interference, but we're able to reach below it and demodulate the signal," he said.
—Ellen Fussell Policastro