What wireless needs to look sharp

Even though it’s always on and accessible pretty much everywhere, wireless networking still needs users to carry out several essential tasks for successful communications and data transfers:

• Complete a thorough site survey to identify the individual distances, physical characteristics and other environmental requirements of each location, especially possible interference sources and line-of-sight or other barriers to antennas and wireless signals, such as steel walls and roofing sections, nearby motors and conveyors, hilly or wooded terrain, and heavy stationary equipment, infrastructures or vehicles.
• Determine speed, bandwidth ranges and information volumes that each data acquisition, storage and transfer application will likely require, as well as how often they’ll have to operate. In general, longer distances, faster speeds, and relaying more data more often demands greater power. Conversely, shorter distances, slower speeds, and sending less data less frequently needs less power. However, it’s important to remember that relaying less data at lower-power frequencies can also conquer longer distances.

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• Address power sources and required performance issues, and primarily determine whether batteries will be sufficient. For instance, many flows, levels, temperatures, pressures and other process values are generated relatively slowly, and don’t need to be reported as often, so their wireless nodes can use batteries that have gained longevity, and can typically run for years. More frequent and detailed data may need added power harvested or generated onsite, or delivered via local networking.
• Research and evaluate which wireless protocol to employ, especially whether to use Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, long-range wireless area network (LoRaWAN) or IO-Link Wireless, or invest in local, private 4G or 5G LTE cellular. For example, Bluetooth (IEEE 802.15.1) runs at 2.4 GHz to deliver about 64 kbps at up to 30 meters; Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11ac) uses 2.4, 5, 6 and 60 GHz to move 433-6,933 Mbps up to 35 meters indoors; and long-range wide-area network (LoRaWAN) runs at 915 MHz to send 3-27 kbps at up to 5 km or 15 km with line-of-sight.
• Settle on a suitable wireless networking strategy and appropriate design that addresses each process application’s performance needs and environmental issues, including cybersecurity, and decide which types of antennas, nodes, access points, routers, switches, servers and other components will serve it best. Typical topologies include line-of-sight, peer-to-peer, stars or hub-and-spoke, self-healing meshes and others. Next, test a simple version of the network design using its essential, bare-bones components, make adjustments based on new findings, and add on and scale up as they network prove capable and secure. Several wireless technologies, notably Wi-Fi, are known for being natively encrypted, but as usual with cybersecurity, it’s important to double check, and make certain that updated protections are in place.