FEATURE Wireless Technology
highly optimised or niche features within a system. However, their major disadvantage is that users are locked in completely to the vendor’s ecosystem of sensors, gateways and enterprise services, with little or no option to integrate third- party sensors or devices. They are also generally incompatible with public LoRa infrastructures and only available on private networks. 2. LoRaWAN. To address the issue of openness and interoperability between sensors and gateways, a protocol layer has been defi ned by the LoRaWAN alliance which defi nes the naming and payload conventions within a system. This means that any LoRaWAN sensor should communicate with any LoRaWAN gateway, allowing users to select the ‘best of breed’ options for each measuring and transmission point, or to buy a system from a single vendor safe in the knowledge that it can be expanded using other vendors’ devices in the future. LoRaWAN can be deployed on both public and private networks. In a public network, all of the gateways and the cloud infrastructure are provided by a third party. Users may connect LoRaWAN sensors to the network and can access the resulting data through the third party’s portal (known as the network server in the LoRa architecture). It’s similar in concept to a cellular network where users connect their phones to a particular network provider’s service, in return for a regular fee. It also suff ers similar drawbacks to a cellular system, where a user has no real indication or control over how many third parties are sharing the same infrastructure and, therefore, how well the system performance will be maintained. An interesting alternative in the industrial world, however, is the ability for users to easily deploy their own networks of gateways to create a private system. In this setup, their data is never placed on a shared infrastructure. Users can recreate the classic LoRaWAN architecture, with a network server located in their data centre. It is becoming increasingly popular to provide some edge processing in the gateways to convert the LoRaWAN data into something more easily consumed by IT systems, such as MQTT or REST, and to provide event processing and aggregation before onward transmission. Wireless technology is often viewed as an “IT technology” by industrial customers. The most common questions requiring consideration involve how to
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Advantech WISE-4610 LoRaWAN IoT wireless, modular I/O
capable of locally integrating the Modbus data and transferring this via a private LoRaWAN network to a LoRaWAN private gateway. The gateway recovered data via LoRaWAN and handed this to the SCADA system by presenting it in Modbus-TCP format. Before implementing this solution, the factory used manual data recovery from the sensors, which was labour-intensive, costly and a source of errors. Eliminating these issues has signifi cant benefi ts in a factory environment where users often have large installed bases of legacy PLCs, RTUs, sensors and other Modbus devices acting in isolation.
utilise this technology for OT systems for maximum effi ciency, real-time data transmission and quantifi able return on investment.
Application: Factory automation The problem:
The customer needed to recover data from remote assets, which have intelligent sensors connected to them, capable of providing information on gas, water and electricity consumption via a Modbus interface. The sensors were several kilometres away from the control room, with concrete walls and other obstructions in between. The cost of installing cables or conventional radios to recover the information was prohibitively high. Also, the control- room system worked using Modbus- TCP and required protocol conversion between the sensors and the host SCADA.
The solution: These problems were overcome by deploying a Wzzard LoRaWAN node,
Wzzard wireless LoRa intelligent edge node
Application: Production forecasting The problem: A customer from the agriculture industry needed to collect raw environmental data from several industrial-scale greenhouses, but the cost of cabling around the sites was not economic. In addition, many of the sites were in remote locations without a landline connection over which to offl oad the data. The data required included climatic elements such as wind speed and direction, temperature, rainfall and solar radiation, which could be taken from a single measuring point for the whole greenhouse. Soil status information was also required for several points around the structure, with a typical greenhouse occupying an area of around 3km². The solution: Cabling costs were eliminated by using Wzzard LoRaWAN nodes to collect the information from soil sensors, and the WISE-6610 LoRaWAN private gateway. The gateway provided several functions: First, it created the private LoRaWAN network and recovered the information sent by the Wzzard LoRaWAN nodes. Secondly, it interfaced directly to the climatic sensors and recovered this information via a local communications interface. Finally, it handed the data off via a 4G LTE cellular connection, meaning that the solution could be deployed anywhere that cellular coverage existed. This customer was able to improve
production and logistic effi ciency and now provides production forecasting insight from the greenhouse environment to his clients using Big Data analysis.
CONTACT:
Advantech
www.advantech.com
Automation | March 2021
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