Wally Pratt, chief engineer of HART Communication Foundation, responded that WirelessHART will coexist with S100.11a.
Kinney said, "I believe that both systems will work transparently, and that you won't even notice that both networks are operating."
Kinney also said that SP100 is working with the IEC community, and that it is the intent to make this standard an international standard.
Kinney did more explanation of his topology drawing, shown earlier, and talked about the differences between non-routing devices and routing devices, as well as transmit-only devices. Transmit-only devices are excluded, in general, although some potential for doing it might be available. However, Jose Gutierrez, Emerson's corporate chief technologist, pointed out that IEEE is forbidden to use transmit-only devices, because by definition they don't coexist. Gutierrez pointed out that there is a loophole in the standard and the 802.15.4 protocol that permits transmit-only, but we have to remember that that defeats coexistence.
An audience member asked how multiple protocols are going to be supported? Conversion or tunneling? Kinney said that tunneling is going to be the answer. "We are merely a transport for that protocol." However, Kinney said, we do have the ability to support the native protocol, and future releases may also support translation instead of tunneling.
The audience member complained that tunneling increases data flow, and decreases battery life. "So what about that?" Kinney danced and said that they were going to support "smart tunneling" and there are ways to mitigate the problems of increased data flow and decreased battery life.
Bob Karshnia, Emerson Rosemount's chief engineer, asked for clarification. The native protocol of S100.11a will be much more robust and better than the other protocols, Kinney said. (So you can either tunnel or translate, I suppose.--ed.)
Leaders relevant to this article: