OT Wireless
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Search the field guide, causes, requirements, and glossary

Field guide

What the application needs, what the wireless design must deliver, and how to prove the worst case fits. Read the guides in order, then the environment you work in.

The guides, in reading order

  1. 01What OT wireless isOT wireless is Wi-Fi, and sometimes a second radio, carrying traffic for machines instead of people, so it is judged by its worst gap rather than its average speed.4 min
  2. 02Why a one-second drop stops a plantIn OT a short network drop trips a connection timeout measured in milliseconds, the timeout stops the machine, and the stop lasts as long as recovery takes, so the wireless job is to prove the worst case fits inside the timeout.7 min
  3. 03The timing budgetStart from the application's timeout, subtract what the wired path and the endpoints need, and what remains is the worst-case outage your wireless design must hold.8 min
  4. 04Safety over wirelessA safety protocol turns a late or missing packet into a stop, so wireless trouble should cost you availability, not people; the hazard is a vehicle that needs a message to stop, and every millisecond it waits is distance traveled.8 min
  5. 05Airtime is finiteEvery client and every frame on a channel spends the same shared airtime, and prioritization only improves the odds, so inventory everything on the air and separate control traffic from bulk traffic before you count on QoS.7 min
  6. 066 GHz on the plant floor6 GHz buys you clean channels and airtime, but it does not shorten the roam between access points, and in several ways it makes the roam harder to get right.10 min
  7. 07Loss of commsEvery mobile robot has a vendor-defined response to a dropped network, set by timers you cannot see from the access point, and you need those numbers for every vehicle before you can say whether any roam is good enough.7 min
  8. 08What to demand from your wireless vendorA checklist for controls engineers who must specify wireless without being RF people, with nine demands, why each matters, and how to make the vendor prove it on your floor.6 min

Cause library

31 causes of disconnects. How each presents, how to confirm it, the fix, and how to design it out.

Environments

What runs there, what it needs from the network, and how wireless fails there.

Technologies

What each one changes for roaming and timing, and what it does not.

Reference