Exploring wireless networks and protocols

Much of this book will focus on connecting to machine and industrial processes, but as we have discussed, ad hoc approaches for monitoring different areas of a plant are sometimes necessary. This chapter will walk through how to approach that goal. It will also allow us to define our architecture and understand how data is ingested, processed, and visualized. We will start by explaining the technology approach and then build some network components as examples.

In the previous chapter, we discussed wireless protocols and some of the pros and cons of various approaches. We would love to get more into the details, but we can’t afford the page space. Most nitty-gritty details are widely available on the internet, such as the frequencies, range, and bandwidth of all the options discussed.

Standardizing your approach

In this chapter, we have chosen LoRaWAN as our wireless protocol example. Using LoRaWAN provides us with some benefits...