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Industrial Wireless Standards at a Glance

On the Same Wavelength

The Internet of Things (IoT) has fundamentally changed the landscape of wireless standards. New transmission methods developed specifically for sensors and actuators in the field are challenging the established triad of Bluetooth, 4/5G, and WiFi. Advances in semiconductor technology are also driving this change, with smaller structure sizes helping to accommodate more compute logic in the same packaging space and, in turn, enabling the practical implementation of what used to be purely theoretical complex wireless methods.

In this article, I provide an overview of wireless standards that currently play a role in industrial environments and in the context of the IoT. The focus is on technologies that have seen innovations in recent months, with the aim of showing the application scenarios and benefits of the individual standards. What this article deliberately does not do is look at the basic physics of wireless transmission over the air interface.

Three Bands for the First Time

As inexpensive WiFi hardware becomes increasingly prevalent, shared use of the air interface is also increasing. WiFi 7 – also known by its IEEE 802.11be designation – addresses this problem with a key innovation: three frequency bands in parallel for the first time.

Besides the 2.4 and 5GHz bands already familiar from WiFi 6, WiFi 7 also supports the 6GHz band that was previously dedicated to the comparatively less widespread WiFi 6E standard – which explains why hardly any of the spectrum capacity has been used to date.

The center line in the spectrum diagram in Figure 1 shows that even the 6GHz band is not completely free. The spectrum has been approved to varying degrees worldwide, meaning that channel availability differs depending on the region. In line with this, and like previous WiFi generations, regional parameterization of