Wireless Ethernet Adapter

Ethernet Overview

Ethernet is the most commonly used industrial protocol. The main reason behind is its numbers of advantages. You can find Ethernet components easily at low cost. PLC (programmable logic controller), the main component of industrial networks, uses a separate protocol. Ethernet offers communication independent of the protocol for the PLCs. Ethernet carries the Modbus or Profibus, the common communication protocols of PLC, information into the TCP / IP packets. Ethernet also supports the multi-points. It means that the devices can easily be attached to the Ethernet network simply as plug n play manner. Now the question is that with so many advantages Why wireless Ethernet, why not wired And the answer is cables? Yes cables are the biggest disadvantage of wired Ethernet. Well if it is static cable installation then cables have no problems. But this is unlikely to happen. Expanding the network and installing more devices increases the cost sometimes more than the Ethernet devices costs. So what is the solution? Yes Wireless Ethernet. Wireless Ethernet eliminates the cables and offers all the advantages that wired Ethernet offers.

Wireless Ethernet IEEE standards

IEEE presents 802.11 standards for wireless communication. IEEE 802.11 specifications include MAC and PHY layers. . PHY layer defines the 802.11 radio frequency protocol. Wired Ethernet is based on IEEE 802.3 standard specifications. A wireless device can be the part of wired Ethernet. In such case the special wireless devices are developed. Such devices are compliant with IEEE 802.1 standard when connected to wired network. At the same time these devices are compliant with IEEE 802.11 standard for wireless data transmission.

Important factors to consider for deploying Wireless Ethernet

There are three major factors you must understand before deploying the Ethernet. The data transfer speed, latency, and throughput. Of course first of all you must decide what speed you want to transfer data. Latency defines the amount of data that can be transmitted or received at one time. One way to increase system throughput is to transmit data for longer times. This works fine only if no retransmission is required. But this rarely happens. Because no matter how carefully you are deploying transmission schemes, at least one time data retransmission is required. As a result latency increases. Being inversely proportional to each other increase in latency decreases overall throughput. To cater this you can also deploy some systems with fixed or adjustable latency.

Architecture of Wireless Ethernet

Structure of a wireless Ethernet depends upon the type of link you are using for the communication. For instance the remote devices will be connected in a different way for point to multipoint than multipoint to point links. You can connect the wireless devices with the combination of these two links. The structure of wireless Ethernet affects the throughput of the system. Because for each link through for a single device varies.