Wireless Infrastructure in Industrial Control Systems

The diverse components of an ICS discussed in the previous chapter must communicate with other components of the ICS. To do so, they are often connected within a “wired” communication architecture. Although wired connections render valuable reliable services to the infrastructure elements, nature or man-made disasters can damage the ICS wired communication infrastructure. It is just one of the reasons why wireless technologies are gradually gaining popularity in ICS architectures, especially as ICS systems undergoing extensive upgrade efforts in the last few years. Nevertheless, although wireless technologies (e.g., WLAN) are maturing and standardizing (NIST 2009) as viable solutions, they are not yet fully exploited as part of the massive upgrade efforts.