WIRELESS COMMUNICATION IN INDUSTRIAL CONTROLLERS
Such a solution significantly shortens the time and facilitates the assembly of the measurement system. Thanks this solution the difficult process of preparing the cable connections very often connected with some earth works or drilling holes is eliminated. It also lowers the risk of accidental damaging the cables.
The transmission is based on a Mesh low power wireless communication protocol.
Depending on the used antenna installation and the specific conditions the practical range between 2 devices may be several hundred meters in the open space and several dozens of meters in the closed spaces. This depends on the number of walls and their material.
Larger range may be obtained with use of a directional antennas, which are "visible" one to another.
A good solution, to increase the range, is to place the antenna outside the building, the antenna cable can have even a dozen of meters.
To increase the range between the meter and the electrodes, when the antennas are not visible one to another, may also be obtained by adding devices called routers. Adding one or more router enables signal retransmission (the elements have to be "visible" one to another.
If the devices work on this same channel the net automatically chooses the shortest ways of communication.
All the meters and electrodes in the network have their own address and thanks to that they recognize each other. The parameters of the network enable up to 128 multichannel devices working in a one place.
The basic security level was ensured by the encryption of the transferred data with the AES algorithm.
It has to be remembered that each of the devices require a local power source.