New Model Needed for Oil, Gas Data Communications

However, this model has shortcomings in terms of bandwidth, cost and security concerns. Available bandwidth can quickly be diminished as more applications and devices are added, increasing the throughput of communications over the network. As a result, data requests may be periodically dropped and never make it to the device. If multiple data collectors are required to retrieve all the data of interest to each application, and each requires exclusive access to the communications medium, the request and response transactions must be processed serially. This means a delay in one transaction has an additive impact on the overall communications cycle because the next transaction cannot be sent until the previous transaction is completed or timed out.

“Unfortunately, the many types of field devices that originate from a wide variety of vendors do not support a universal protocol,” said Paine and Treat. “As such, there is a 1:1 correlation between the number of data collectors required to run on the host communication server and the number of vendor-specific device types that are part of the overall operation.”

The inefficiency of multiple data collectors making requests to the same devices at the same time also can raise costs in cases where there is a cost-per-byte for the data being transmitted.

Many of the vendor-specific protocols were developed with knowledge of these bandwidth limitations and cost concerns. As a result, vendors have focused on engineering these protocols down to the bare minimum needed to access data within the device. Paine and Treat noted that these protocols are inherently unsecure, and could be subject to man in the middle attacks.

“This may not be a concern when communications are limited to a private network with physical barriers; however, there usually comes a time when this data needs to be made available externally over public networks, and secure communications will need to be implemented.”

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