Wireless local area networks and its impact on current and future production processes
Łukasz Wiśniewski, Henning Trsek, Jürgen Jasperneite · Management and Production Engineering Review · 2011
Received: 10 January 2011 Abstract Accepted: 7 February 2011 Nowadays there is a high demand to produce more, for a lower price and at the same time offer diversity of products. To achieve these aims, production lines need to be more flexible. The current network communications systems are dominated by the Ethernet technology and dedicated industrial protocols. Ethernet based industrial protocols have many advantages like: full duplex communication without collisions, high bandwidth or high communication reliability. However, they have one big disadvantage, limited mobility. Since a network device needs to be connected using cable, its placement is rather fixed. Apart from that, costs related with wired network infrastructure or further extensions are expensive and frequently complicated. Due to these reasons, the industrial users are looking towards wireless communication. A prominent candidate is the IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard, as it has comparable with the Ethernet data rates and resembles data link layer. An overview of how the WLAN standard fits to the industrial environment and a discussion about the current usage of the WLAN in industrial environments as well as outlook for future deployments will be given.