Do you know what is an industrial cellular router? And why we need it? If you’re beginner to IoT, this article may help you to get the answer.
What Is an Industrial Cellular Router?
Industrial cellular router is a device designed based on industrial grade components, and it is able to operate under 24/7, wide temperature range(-35。C~+75。C) and harsh environment. Besides, it has industrial I/O and protocols for IoT sensors and controllers to transfer the data to remote cloud server. In addition, it can be remote controlled and managed via SMS or commands sent by operator and remote server. Today, industrial router has been mainly used for IIoT(Industrial Internet of Things) and M2M (Machines to Machines) applications, such as industry 4.0, gas, oil, water, power, mining, etc.
Why Need Industrial Cellular Router?
Today, the IoT has played an important role in our life, such as, automatic meter reading, ATM of bank, vending machines, kiosk, digital signage, traffic light control, etc. While just like human beings need mobile phone for daily-life’s communication, the things from IoT(Internet of Things) also need cellular router to set up a communication tunnel with cloud server, as a result, finding an industrial cellular router to provide a secure and reliable connectivity over cellular network is critical.
Benefits
For industrial IoT application, it’s better to choose industrial cellular router over consumer cellular routers, here are some reasons.
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Robust and Reliable
It normally can operate between -35~+75。C, while consumer cellular router normally can only operate under 0-60。C. Besides, there is software and hardware watchdog to ensure the device can fully auto reboot and recovery if there are failures.
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Secure
It supports multiple of VPN, such as IPsec, OpenVPN, GRE, PPTP, L2TP, etc. In additional, it supports APN, which both provides a private network for internal data transmission.
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Smart
It is smarter than consumer router, for example, you can remotely configure the devices via SMS or commands, and use device management platform to remote monitor the status of devices anytime and anywhere.
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Rich I/O and protocols
For industrial applications, there are diverse type interface of sensors, controllers, such as RS232, RS485, RJ45, Digital input, analog input, relay output, while the consumer cellular router only has RJ45. Furthermore, industrial sensors and controllers normally have their own protocols, such as Modbus RTU, Modbus TCP, MQTT, DNP3, etc.
To conclude, for mission-critical industrial application, those are some benefits of using industrial router.
Link: https://www.bivocom.com/blog/choose-the-right-industrial-routers
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