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Tropos Announces New Offerings for Smart Grid Field Area Networks
January 18, 2012
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Tropos Networks recently announced the availability of the company's 1410 wireless mesh router and wireless bridge for field automation applications. The new product line is designed to extend advanced enterprise-class security to utility and industrial applications that monitor and control field automation devices. It also is intended to provide communications for these applications for as little as half the cost of competitive proprietary, low-speed wireless networks per connected automation endpoint.
Tropos 1410 wireless mesh routers and wireless bridges are designed to create secure, IP-based field area communication networks serving thousands of automation endpoints such as intelligent electrical devices, industrial process controllers and SCADA devices. The integrated hardware design of the Tropos 1410 is designed to allow it to achieve a cost up to 50 percent lower than that of single-purpose, proprietary, lower-speed communication offerings. The product line's integrated firewall and VPN are intended to extend enterprise-class security to legacy devices installed in the field that have lacked state-of-the-art security technology. The wireless mesh routers can be centrally managed by the Tropos Control wireless network management, monitoring and control application.
Utility, mining, oil and gas as well as other industries are increasingly using wireless communications networks to monitor and control assets in the field and large outdoor facilities. These field area networks support a diverse set of applications including automated metering infrastructure and distribution automation for utilities; telemetry and mining management systems for mining; wellhead monitoring and logging for oil and gas; traffic signal management and video monitoring for transportation; process control for refining and chemicals; and SCADA for a wide variety of vertical markets. In the past, companies have been forced to rely on proprietary low-speed wireless communications systems with little security to implement their field area networks.
The Tropos 1410 is intended to deliver the most advanced set of security features available for field area networks. Each wireless mesh router and bridge will include a built-in firewall and a built-in IPsec VPN. They are designed to implement a multi-layer, multi-application security model that provides defense-in-depth and enables traffic from different applications and user groups to be segregated on separate virtual local area networks (VLANs), each with its own address space, quality of service (QoS) policies and security policies including the capability to create one or more standard IPsec VPNs per VLAN. The wireless mesh router employs RADIUS, 802.1x, and 802.11i authentication, AES encryption and HTTPS-based remote access to secure field area networks from unauthorized devices, users and snooping. The Tropos 1410's operating software complies with the requirements of NIST FIPS 140-2 Level 2 for U.S. government cyber security and NERC CIP 002-009 for utility critical infrastructure protection.
Source: Tropos
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