Industrial and commercial RF environments are dynamic and harsh. Complex equipment, work crews, equipment racks, freezers, Bluetooth interference, and even microwave ovens present continual changes that can affect a network. In fact, environmental changes such as these can easily make an RF site survey obsolete the instant it is completed. Therefore, a reliable wireless network solution must be able to self-heal and self-optimize throughout the life of the network to cope with the ever changing RF environment. That’s why Dust Networks SmartMesh products all include a Network Manager.

Most mesh networks have some form of network healing. That is, if a path goes down between two nodes, each node tries to connect to a different node to get its message through. This "reactive healing" process is a minimum requirement for any mesh and can be sufficient for small networks. However, large networks in challenging RF environments require proactive intelligent network-wide management.

To succeed in such environments, a network needs to constantly self-survey its health and performance, and intelligently use this information to anticipate problems and head them off. Essentially, such networks are performing an automatic site survey 24-hours-a-day, every day.

When used in conjunction with dynamic mesh optimization algorithms, this information allows the network configuration to be automatically and intelligently updated. The system ensures that each transmission takes an acceptable path through network, providing programmable latency and network power consumption, and ensuring that there are no network chokepoints. Think of this as a bit like driving on a highway in a big city: if you have a network connected GPS system, it might route you off the traffic-jammed freeway a few exits earlier to make your way to your destination using surface streets.

Some network architectures, such as ZigBee, do not provide managed network optimization. Make no mistake-continuous and intelligent network management is a requirement for optimal performance in challenging RF environments.