The information you need is all around you - The challenge is getting access to it in a reliable, cost-effective way.  Imagine, however, that a company could measure, manage and refine data from the physical world through a wireless network with the same reliability expected from a wired solution – and at a significantly lower cost.  Data from the physical world, including temperature, lighting, humidity, energy consumption, and movement, could then be married to the world of industrial systems and IT.

Today, new standards-based wireless sensor systems based on the pioneering work of Dust Networks are delivering the reliability, low-power consumption, and ease-of-use required to serve a wide range of applications for monitoring and control.  The results have been a wide range of companies putting wireless to work on specific applications in the plant.  Real world examples of wireless sensing successfully applied include ensuring environmental conditions are safe, monitoring critical process parameters and equipment conditions, and even gaining easy access to the critical performance metrics contained in the sensors themselves.

While prior experience with proprietary point to point wireless systems often creates skepticism when the decision is made to try this new technology, the technical issues have been resolved through the techniques of time synchronized mesh networking.  More importantly, these new solutions are easy to install and can save a great deal of time and money during installation when compared to a wired solutions.  The wireless field devices can also be put virtually anywhere – with little regard for previous wiring concerns.