ISA tackles industrial compatibility with Wi-Fi

ON World , a San Diego-based research group focused on emerging wireless markets, predicts 168 million wireless network nodes will be deployed by 2010, making for a $5.9-billion end-user market. A recent study by Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner indicates that among

System costs also will be coming down. The U. S. Department of Energy (DoE) predicts "by 2010, the installed cost of a wireless system should be only one-tenth of today's installed cost."

Specific to manufacturing, wireless applications are moving out of the office, living room, and local coffee house and onto the factory floor.

But as is often the case with new technologies, there's a hitch. The DoE study, Industrial Wireless Technology for the 21st Century , found that few of the millions of wireless devices in use in industrial applications are networked or standardized.

Now, the Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) has formed a new committee—ISA-SP100—to create standards and recommend practices for wireless networking of manufacturing and automation controls all the way down to the fieldbus level. Technologies covered will include field sensors for monitoring, control, alarm and shutdown; and real-time, field-to-business communications for process and discrete manufacturing.

"The goal is to develop an end-to-end wireless standard for all networking layers," says Wayne Manges of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and chairman of the ISA committee. The standard will encompass such factory-floor applications as process automation and supervisory control.

ISA wants to ensure any standard developed will work with the popular Wi-Fi standard. "Compatibility of any industrial wireless standard with the Wi-Fi standard is critical to the success of this committee," says Manges.

The committee is quantifying the requirements for the standard, including throughput, security, reliability, and latency. According to Manges, representatives from systems vendors and users will collaborate with the Wireless Industrial Networking Alliance, as well as other groups working on wireless standards, "to avoid duplicating effort."

The SP100 committee plans to publish a complete list of requirements for the standard in third-quarter 2005, with a view to publishing a draft standard within a year.

For more information on the ISA-SP100 committee, visit www.isa.org/community/SP100