V. CURRENT RESEARCH AREAS
A. Wireless Technology
There is currently a trend within industrial networking
to implement fieldbus protocols using wireless technologies
[7]. There are many parallels between the current movement
towards wireless and the previous movement towards Ethernet.
As with Ethernet, it was decided that the reutilisation of
existing standards was preferable to the development of new
physical and data-link layers specifically for industrial use, as
it allowed the existing research and manufacturing base to be
exploited in order to decrease development time and costs.
Technologies that make use of unlicensed bandwidth are the
most popular, such as Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN)
IEC 802.11, IEC 802.15.1 known as Bluetooth and IEC
802.15.4 which is used as the basis of the ZigBee protocol. The
benefits of wireless technology are clear - a further reduction
in the amount of wiring required for communication, which
in turn reduces installation costs.