Industrial Wireless Technologies: applications for the electrical utilities

Abstract

The industrial world has been thinking since a couple a years of the use of wireless technologies in its environment despite the implementation of an ideal industrial wireless standard. However, the industrial environments are not taken into consideration in the design of those standards, because its harsh constraints has specific characteristics (reliability, interferences with existing equipments, multi-path propagation, low-power consumption, real-time reconfiguration, security...) that need specific requirements and eventually standards. This paper will present the scope of the wireless technologies from a technical perspective, the constraints that the industrial environment imply on wireless networks and namely on the radio transmission, finally giving axes of solutions and elements of the current deployments if wireless technologies in EDF (Electricite de France). Our current works showed us that there is no perfect technology by it-self but the best trade-off solution is a hybrid architecture combining the right wired and wireless technologies.