To maintain utmost compatibility with existing wired fieldlevel
networks, it is advisable to adopt the strategy from industrial
Ethernet and use only the lower layers of the wireless
technologies (these are the ones that are typically standardized,
anyway). The higher protocol layers could then be taken from
wired field-level networks. Depending on the capabilities of
the wireless technology and the requirements of the wired
field-level protocol, the resulting protocol architecture can be
different (see Fig. 5), and the endpoint of the migration path can
be anything between pure data object compatibility and tight
integration of wireless links as extensions of a wired network.