Cockrell Ranch Waterflood: What Wireless Network?

The overall network covered 12 square miles with the longest link being two miles and a bulk of the radios were positioned in an area of about three square miles which presented a concern. “In a radio network of this size it is imperative that care be taken in setting up the PLC messaging,” said Patrick Haga, ProSoft Wireless Engineer. “If all radios are trying to communicate at the same time, you can quickly swamp your bandwidth with RF collisions and retries.”

He added, “This in mind, we discussed the need to create a polling style network rather than having all the radios trying to communicate at the same time.”

Chris Deakin of Boss Automation said, “The process is incredibly reliable, consistent and makes for an essentially self-managed site. From the main SCADA monitoring station, the operators are able to see virtual diagrams of the wells and what is going on within them, as well as all the data collected by the RTUs and control units.”

The project went live in 2008 and has had near zero downtime. “The wireless network works so seamlessly and reliably that it is virtually transparent to the user,” Deakin said. “When all was said and done I asked the customer how they liked the wireless network. Their response: what wireless network?”

Harry Forbes of ARC Advisory Group noted, “The Cockrell Ranch Waterflood project illustrates three important points about industrial wireless. First, wireless is indispensible for this kind of SCADA project to be cost-effective. Second, end users need to select hardened, industrial, field-proven products to provide a lifelong, reliable wireless solution. Third, a well-designed wireless network can deliver data in a SCADA system with very high reliability, in fact so high that end users forget about it.”