No wiring constraints

Wireless technologies are gaining increased acceptance as a viable technology within the industrial solution space. However, it is important for control system architects to fully understand not only the benefits but also the challenges and limitations of wireless technologies. The complex interrelationships between the various wireless technology characteristics require careful tradeoffs to be made in the design of the solution. This is especially true for applications that need to handle continuous data streams where high capacity is critical to maintain the scalability and reliability of the network. Although still relatively new, mesh networks have proven themselves to have significant advantages in robustness, scalability, and low-power consumption over other wireless technologies for use in industrial monitoring applications. Mesh networks employing PDR address the scalability challenges of wireless sensor networking that can limit implementation in production situations by significantly increasing overall packet-delivery rate and reducing network communication overhead. HC_WSN, an approach that will emerge as the important next trend in the wireless sensor networking industry, can be implemented in addition to PDR techniques and will further support the increasing number of applications that require the wireless sensor network to handle greater amounts of data.