A factory-floor wireless network combining Wi-Fi for mobile equipment with an independent industrial mesh for PLC-adjacent sensing, engineered for an RF environment that is actively hostile and constantly changing.
The project brief: a 150,000 sq ft discrete-manufacturing plant with roughly 60 VFD-driven motors, a high-bay steel racking area, and a mobile fleet of 18 forklifts and 12 AGVs that need persistent wireless connectivity while they roam the entire floor. Unlike an office or hospital Wi-Fi deployment, the RF environment here changes in real time — moving metal loads, overhead cranes, and broadband electrical noise from the VFD fleet all shift the propagation picture continuously, and everything downstream of that fact, from cell sizing to controller redundancy to the roaming design, follows from engineering for an environment that is actively working against the network.
This module walks the whole project the way a real industrial wireless engineer would: the specific RF propagation challenges of a metal-heavy, VFD-noisy floor, a fully worked RF link budget and AP cell-sizing calculation, a redundant AP/controller architecture designed for N+1 continuity, a worked roaming-timing analysis for AGVs and forklifts explaining why 802.11r fast roaming is mandatory even at low vehicle speeds, how PLC-adjacent wireless connectivity is actually structured (and why safety-rated E-stop signals stay off the general Wi-Fi network entirely), and the OT/IT network segmentation and cybersecurity design that protects it. The full worked numbers, complete bill of materials, and finished design reasoning are part of the unlocked module below.