Why advanced networking is crucial to control room solutions
The eye-catching video walls, expensive AV equipment and state-of-the-art visualisation software might be the first thing you imagine when you think about a control room, but underpinning the success of all those elements is the networking that keeps it all working in real time. And that’s why the crucial ingredient in a control room solution is advanced networking technology.
The networking technologies deployed for your control room installation should be a priority design consideration.
Let’s take a look at the reasons why advanced networking is so crucial to control room success.
The sheer number of connected devices
Today’s modern control rooms take inputs from a vast array of software, hardware, IoT devices and sensors, cameras and other equipment and data analytics tools. Supporting these myriad inputs – each with their own firmware, standards, protocols and requirements, as well as the traffic management that comes with such an array of inputs – requires flexible solutions with advanced traffic prioritisation and management tools which can adapt in real time.
The inclusion of high-bandwidth data sources
Control rooms increasingly incorporate high-bandwidth inputs, such as high-resolution CCTV cameras that provide real-time surveillance and monitoring or Ultra HD IP-encoded streams. This requires the network capacity to support this volume of information. Underspecified capacity could lead to latency issues, buffering, reduced image quality or pixelation, or even packet loss and dropped data. Here, critical information or portions of the streams may be lost, leading to incomplete data and potential error. Or it can result in network congestion, where the overloaded network causes other inputs or operations to slow down or fail.
The demand for real time data, insights and action
Real-time decision making is a much-touted benefit of our highly connected world. But for this to happen, the vast quantities of data need to be collected, validated, possibly aggregated, analysed and displayed. The resulting insights need to be presented coherently for informed decision making. Depending where this data aggregation and analysis is happening – perhaps on edge devices, perhaps in the cloud – your control network needs to support these capabilities.
Where artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools are being used, likely running in the cloud due to its capacity to support bursts of high compute capacity and the variety of AI services now available in the big cloud providers platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings, your control room network must support this connectivity securely and with low latency or risk of packet loss.
The need for resilience and redundancy in high-criticality operations
Depending on the criticality of the control room operations, the control room network may require a highly resilient and redundant configuration. This demands multiple failover options to ensure operations aren’t disrupted in the case of a failure and that data isn’t lost during failover.
For example, control rooms for emergency services and critical national infrastructure will need the highest level of resilience and redundancy. Office control rooms will need basic failover capabilities. Financial services, aviation, healthcare facilities and manufacturing facilities will probably fall somewhere between the two. Understanding the criticality of the service being delivered and the recovery point objectives (RPO) and recovery time objectives (RTO) will be critical to your network design.
Building in cyber security excellence
A secure network minimises the risk of downtime caused by malware, ransomware or other cyber threats, maintaining seamless operations.
Cyber security is especially important in a control room context because, as we’ve discussed, control rooms often manage critical infrastructure, such as energy grids, transportation systems and emergency services. A cyberattack on the network could disrupt operations, leading to severe consequences. In addition, many of these industries have strict cybersecurity standards. Ensuring robust network security helps meet these requirements and avoid legal or financial penalties.
Your control room network design should support network segmentation, intrusion detection systems, monitoring and alerts. In addition, your supplier’s ongoing network technical support should ensure all components are updated and maintained to avoid potential vulnerabilities. You should also implement measures, such as regular security audits, to enhance the ongoing cybersecurity posture of the control room.
Capabilities for visual display and remote monitoring
Inside your control room, your network needs to support the visual display of your data, insights, live visualisations of equipment, dashboards and, potentially, live video and/or audio streams. As we’ve discussed, ensuring these displays aren’t affected by buffering, data loss, pixelation, etc. requires sufficient network capacity.
Further, it may be necessary to securely share some of these feeds with external decision makers. In an emergency situation, this might mean live data sharing to enable synchronised actions between control room operators and emergency responders. Or, in a strategic planning context, external stakeholders may use historical control room data for long-term planning, resource allocation or policy making. Understanding the likely scenarios in which data streams might need to be shared, helps you to design your network capacity and capabilities appropriately so that performance and security aren’t compromised in an emergency situation.
Additional capacity to allow for further integrations or expansions
Your control room network design needs to offer potential to extend or expand the solution, as required. For example, if your operations expand, the control room might need to handle an increased number of data streams or users and/or additional functionality. Plus, as technology evolves, new tools, systems and devices will emerge and require integration. Designing with capacity for future integration ensures that your control room can adopt these advancements without requiring a complete overhaul.
Ongoing support of your control room network
Another important consideration will be the future support and maintenance of your control room network. How will this be managed? Do you need the support of your suppliers to facilitate this? And if so, what support do your suppliers offer? Thinking ahead helps you to get your purchasing decisions right.
Balancing all these control room requirements with cost
Against all these requirements and desirable qualities, your control room solution budget is weighed. How does altering specifications affect the overall system cost vs the overall system performance? Understanding the nuances of these decisions helps you to get it right first time.
What next?
Are you planning a control room implementation? If you need help considering what your control room network should look like, please reach out to our team.