Martin Poppelaars, VP EMEA Sales at Lantronix explores the freedom of wireless and how advances in the technology are mitigating new possibilities.
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 are looking to these as a key business driver for 2012.
But before any investment is made, it is important to take stock of the reasons for your business 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 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.
The real-world benefits of wireless can be seen across almost every industry. Some specific examples include the following:
Healthcare: As news of medical mistakes become more public, wireless applications are 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.
Retail: A major music store, for example, has set-up wireless kiosks that provide real-time streaming of music videos, seasonal fashion displays, ticket-selling services, local web access, on-line music sampling, and other content residing on a video server.
Manufacturing: A major facility control centre has integrated wireless device servers to Ethernet-enable all of the equipment in its support centre. This is saving 1,500 feet of wiring and conduit; spanning multiple buildings, and giving over 500 PCs in the support centre access to real-time information as it is generated by the process control equipment.
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.
The wireless landscape
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 more detail:
900MHz technology: This is an unlicensed spectrum that has been commonly and traditionally used for portable phones, microwaves and wireless internet services.
Internationally, the 900MHz band is widely used for a Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) mobile telephone systems or military communications. As a result, companies with sites around the globe cannot standardise on 900MHz-based solutions for all locations.
But the 900MHz 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.
Wi-Fi: A generic term that refers to any type of 802.11 network. 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.
Bluetooth: A short-range (10 metre) 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, it 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 spectrum.
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.
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 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.
