NEC today announced the development of a wireless network technology with the aim to enable production lines to be flexibly adapted through real-time remote control of devices such as sensors, displays, and robots at manufacturing sites and other locations. NEC aims to commercialize the technology in 2017.
According to NEC, the spread of the Internet of Things (IoT) in recent years has led to demand in manufacturing sites and other locations for vast numbers of sensors and manufacturing equipment to be connected in a wireless network and for these devices to be controlled in real-time. Factories can be challenging environments for communications owing to radio wave reflections and attenuation from the presence of robots and metal. NEC said that its new network technology creates a stable wireless connection between computers and manufacturing equipment in challenging environments such as these.
As part of the development, NEC will develop a "non-retransmission model redundancy encoding" system that restores lost packets on the receiver's end without the need for retransmission in the wireless area of "ExpEther," NEC's proprietary technology that controls devices centrally in real-time.
Yuichi Nakamura, General Manager, System Platform Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation
This technology achieves stable connections in wireless network environments inside factories, where communications are frequently lost, through the application of 'non-retransmission model redundancy encoding,' which transmits information accurately, without the need for retransmission.
