Industrial wireless sensor users aren’t asking for much. They want a reliable, secure network that can transmit data at the pace of business, and they’d like a range of standards-based products and vendors from which to choose.
They may as well have asked for the moon.
Today’s industrial wireless sensor networks market has a Rip Van Winkle quality to it: If you’d fallen asleep during the fieldbus wars of the 1990s and woken up in present day, you might wonder whether much time at all had passed. Today’s battles eschew wires in favor of over-the-air transmissions, but the same fragmentation marks the terrain.
It is not unlike the early years of most innovative technologies, which tend to be marked by fractiousness, as eager startups pursue disparate paths to market and develop products that operate in dissimilar ways. Until standardization emerges — a process that can take many years — end users must deal with conflicting signals from the vendor community. More than a decade ago, this phenomenon gave users of industrial wired communications Foundation Fieldbus, Profibus-PA, Modbus, and other protocols. In recent years, the same discordance has given rise to wireless sensor specifications ZigBee, WirelessHART, 6LoWPAN, and ISA100.