Integrating an Industrial Wireless Sensor Network With Your Plant's Switched Ethernet and IP Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are gaining market acceptance in numerous industrial segments because they are both cheaper and faster to deploy than traditional wired field-buses. WSNs can also offer incremental value from a variety of additional usages by leveraging the entire network to connect the sensors to a centralized controlling application for supervisory control or logging. However, a number of issues are raised when integrating a proprietary network operated by process control with tight response time and availability constraints, into a wider, more complex IT network that already supports a large number of applications with wireless, switched, and IP technologies.