Wireless condition monitoring with smartmesh

One of the barriers that has prevented the adoption of conventional monitoring systems has been the complexity and cost associated with running wiring for signals and power around industrial plants.

Although point-to-point wireless systems do offer one potential solution, end users have been wary of deploying them, unconvinced that they would perform reliably enough in a factory environment.

Now, the Smartmesh wireless-communications technology developed by Hayward, California-based Dust Networks claims to have overcome the limitations of earlier systems while delivering the data quality and access of permanent, fully wired condition-monitoring equipment.
The communications protocol driving Dust Networks’ Smartmesh wireless system is called the Time Synchronized Mesh Networking Protocol (TSMP). It supports self-organising networks of wireless devices, called ’motes’, that stay synchronised to each other and communicate in timeslots in a similar way to TDM (Time-Division Multiplexing) systems.

Such communication allows the motes to be extremely low power, as they are only powered up when they are scheduled to communicate with one another. The protocol is also designed to operate reliably in a noisy environment, which might typically be found on a plant or a factory floor.