What is your biggest nightmare when planning a new industrial sensor network? That you cannot trust the communication link? That it is not secure and easily hacked? Or simply that you need to pull miles of cable in an industrial site that is already full of equipment? Or maybe replacing batteries every second month?

Why not take benefit of a secure, reliable and low power communication standard that is free of wires and providing long battery lifetime? Wireless M-Bus (EN 13757-4:2013) is a wireless communication standard that was developed for the reading of utility meters. Utility meters that are used to protect and measure some of the highest value and scare resources being traded; electricity, gas and water.

All your worries and nightmares have already been addressed in the development of the Wireless M-Bus standard. Therefore you will find that Wireless M-Bus is also a very good alternative as a communication standard for industrial wireless sensor networks in general.

Your industrial sensors and actuators can take benefit of this technology, to be read or operated at a distance, reliable and secure. And completely without wires, while batteries last for years.

Take the benefit of an established standard that has been developed by teams of leading industry experts. The solutions are well established and proven in the field since its first release in 2005. It is supported by all the leading companies in the metering industry, and is by far the mostly used standard for wireless meter reading in Europe with tens of millions of units in the field. For example, reading of gas meters in France and Italy is done using the Wireless M-Bus standard at 169 MHz. Reading billing information from remote utility meters puts very high requirements to the protocol in terms of security, reliability and battery lifetime. The standard is like a toolbox where we can pick and use the right tool in different situations; that is, operating frequency, power consumption, range, encryption and other security elements. Products based on the standard are now used not only in Europe, but as far as Australia and the US. Compact radio modules from Radiocrafts are the building blocks you need to take advantage of this technology in your next sensor network.

Start a new life free of the previous worries by reading the new Application Note from Radiocrafts which gives you an understanding of how to use a Wireless M-Bus module in an industrial sensor network.