ABI: Key Developing Industrial Wireless Sensor Networking Standard Looks to IP
October 30, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
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According to ABI Research, it appears likely that the developing Instrumentation, Systems and Automation Society (ISA) SP-100.11a industrial wireless sensor networking (WSN) standard will adopt the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 6LoWPAN WSN networking protocol - to a greater or lesser extent - as ISA SP-100.11a's own networking layer.
Although exact details are still to be worked out, the ISA SP-100.11a Committee agreed to the adoption of 6LoWPAN as a general principle. Analysts said ISA SP-100.11a is a key effort to standardize WSN technology for industrial use cases.
Analysts said the adoption of 6LoWPAN potentially provides several important benefits to the ISA SP-100.11a standard at the networking layer, depending on how 6LoWPAN is implemented.
For example, the full 6LoWPAN standard has recourse to the full range of IETF tool sets and management techniques developed and refined over the years for Internet protocol version four (IPv4) and IP version six (IPv6).
These are tools that recent non-IP-based WSN standards, such as ZigBee and Z-Wave, have to develop essentially from scratch.
Likewise, analysts said full 6LoWPAN functionality would enable individual ISA SP-100.11a sensor nodes to communicate directly with the wider IP-based world (enterprise back-end infrastructure, for example), as opposed to relying on the mediation of gateway proxies and application profiles, as is currently the case with ZigBee.
"To date, many implementations within the industrial market have been proprietary - so a technology vendor will come up with its own wireless sensor networking technology from the standpoint of the physical layer and proprietary networking protocols," said Sam Lucero, senior analyst for ABI Research. "This leads to vendor lock-in and higher prices."
Vendor lock-in is a significant problem, analysts said, as companies do not want to deploy an expensive system and then later find out the vendor no longer supports it. In contrast, ISA SP-100.11a and 6LoWPAN are open standards efforts. ISA SP-100.11a should be ratified as a standard in 2008.
Source: ABI Research.