Rockwell Automation and Cisco Develop Design and Implementation Guide for Deploying Wireless Equipment in The Connected Enterprise

Rockwell Automation and Cisco announced the release of a white paper and design and implementation guide titled, "Deploying 802.11 Wireless LAN Technology within a Converged Plantwide Ethernet Architecture." The detailed design guidance will help control system engineers, IT network engineers, and system integrators implement IP-based wireless networks.

The guide provides information on 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN) solutions within a Converged Plantwide Ethernet (CPwE) architecture, including design considerations for fixed position, nomadic and mobile equipment use cases. It also includes explanations for how to configure, maintain and troubleshoot WLAN for each use case, and detailed documentation on how the architectures were tested and validated by Cisco and Rockwell Automation. With this new resource, network designers can create a small network within a plant using a single autonomous access point, and scale up to create a larger, unified WLAN architecture.

The recommendations provided in these documents were demonstrated in the Industrial IP Advantage booth at this year's Automation Fair event in Anaheim, California. The entire booth, a small-scale representation of the CPwE architecture, featured a plant operations control room equipped with a WLAN controller and Cisco Lightweight Access Point. The network extends to process and packaging areas in the booth via the Allen Bradley Stratix 5100 wireless access point/work group bridge, which was jointly developed by Rockwell Automation and Cisco.

Rockwell Automation and Cisco position its partnership as a resource in industry for helping manufacturers to improve business performance by bridging the technical and cultural gaps between plant-floor automation and higher-level information systems. Through collaboration on products, services, validated architectures and educational resources, the two companies seek to help manufacturers converge their network infrastructure, and bring together IT and operations using an IP-based network to help to achieve the connected enterprise.

Harry Forbes, ARC Advisory Group, commented, "Wi-Fi networks (or IEEE 802.11) are incredibly useful in factory and plant applications – so useful that manufacturers must thoughtfully plan their Wi-Fi networks as an infrastructure serving all types of applications. This new and timely resource from Rockwell Automation and Cisco incorporates lessons that many manufacturers learned through experience."

Keywords: Wireless LAN Technology, Network Architecture, Network Engineers, System Integrators, Wireless Networks, WLAN Architecture, ARC Advisory Group.