Wireless technology is an essential business enabler for the automation world. It has gained rapid acceptance in many industrial sectors because of its cost effectiveness, reliability, fast deployment, and flexibility. Over the past four decades, ultrahigh frequency (UHF) radios have been widely used for long-range supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) connectivity in the oil and gas and power and utility sectors. The UHF radio platform was an optimum low-speed connectivity solution that interconnected field remote terminal units (RTUs) to a centralized SCADA host using 25-kilohertz channels. It yielded roughly a 19.6-kilobits-persecond wireless data rate. This capacity is barely adequate for pulling data from field devices and sending supervisory control commands to the field, such as close/open to a valve and start/stop to a pump.
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