Energy & Utilities

Gas pipeline compressors must continually adapt to demand, as must electricity generation and transmission systems. Failure to respond rapidly to any change can lead to blackouts with both financial and life and death consequences.

Today, new requirements to support distributed generation and demand side control along with a growing emphasis on security is forcing the upgrade of outdated SCADA networks. These upgrades include the use of state-of-the-art video-surveillance and remote trouble-shooting systems that help dispatched field engineers to quickly diagnose and solve the problem relying on real-time information sharing with Headquarters and technical centers.

Solution Overview

iDirect’s advanced technology provides the features central to upgrading and securing the national energy and utility infrastructure. While SCADA applications typically require a fairly low data rate, it’s critical that every alarm or control message is transmitted within a guaranteed time frame. iDirect systems feature a deterministic access method – D-TDMA — that means a remote site can get bandwidth within a pre-designed time limit, not based on a statistical process as with random access (Aloha) systems.

In addition to this guaranteed access scheme, iDirect provides Group Quality of Service (GQoS). With GQoS, remote sites can also be equipped to provide on-demand video surveillance and VoIP access plus corporate LAN access for visiting engineers, without compromising the basic deterministic SCADA bandwidth.

iDirect technology provides a communications path that is completely independent of terrestrial network systems. The security and integrity of the communications are ensured: links can be encrypted using AES as standard on our FIPS 140-2 compliant platform.

With extremely efficient bandwidth technologies such as iDirect’s DVB-S2/ACM implementation and the scalable, universal hub solution you can easily scale your network from just a few hundred sites to several 1000 sites.

Implementation and deployment are extremely easy with iDirect’s Network Management System, iVantage® enabling easy configuration, monitoring and control of the entire network.