3
A05-0473-010
AGILE™ RF FIRE SYSTEM
The Agile™ 200 Series RF fire system is designed for use with
compatible intelligent fire systems using the System Sensor
200/500 Series CLIP, Enhanced and Advanced communication
protocols. Devices signalling from the radio domain are translated
by the RF gateway into addressable loop communication signals
recognized by the Control and Indicating Equipment (CIE). Each
device has its own physical address on the loop, selected using
two rotary switches, which can be manually set in a range between
1 and 99 or 1 and 159 depending on the loop protocol used by the
panel.
The system architecture can be characterised as shown in
Figure 3
following.
Figure 3: System Overview
WIRED FIRE SYSTEM
WIRELESS FIRE SYSTEM
CIE
DETECTOR
SOUNDER /
STROBE
GATEWAY
REPEATER
WIRELESS
DETECTOR
WIRELESS CALL
POINT
LAPTOP / PC
RUNNING
AgileIQ™
USB
INTERFACE
(DONGLE)
MODULE CALL POINT
The red and black lines show the wired loop; the dotted
blue lines represent the RF communication. A PC has
the ability to communicate with all the wireless devices
using a special software application (AgileIQ™) and
USB transmit/receive interface dongle.
Figure 4: Mesh Hierarchy
The Agile™ RF Mesh Network
When two devices in a network can communicate directly, they
are said to have a
link
. The devices at each end of a link are
known as nodes and a network is made up of a set of nodes and
links. For the 200 Series RF system, each RF device can receive
and transmit wireless information and hence each RF link has bi-
directional communication.
As every RF device is a transceiver the network can be organized
to minimize the use of repeaters. This is achieved by allowing each
device to receive and re-transmit information from its neighbours
on to the master device (the gateway).
The Concept of Mesh Hierarchy
When there is a direct path between nodes, say from device #1
to device #2, the two nodes are linked. Within the mesh there
are the concepts of ‘parents’ and ‘children’, and ‘ancestors’ and
‘descendants’, moving in the direction from the gateway to the
mesh boundary. So, whilst links have bi-directional communication,
there is also a concept of link directionality with respect to the order
or ranking of each of the devices. This is why links are shown with
directional arrows, establishing the hierarchy of the nodes.
In the Agile™ RF system, each node can have up to 6 active links
with its neighbours; 2 links going toward the gateway (one from
each of its 2 parents) and up to 4 links going toward the network
boundaries (i.e.to 4 children). A gateway is a special RF node and
can have up to 32 links.
Node
Directional
Link
Parent
Ancestor
Child
Descendant
4
1
3
5
2
6
Direction of Mesh Boundary
In general, to satisfy the Agile™ mesh protocol criteria in terms
of hierarchy and timings, all nodes should be descendents of the
gateway, (i.e. there must be a chain of primary links to/from the
gateway) and each device will have one primary link to a parent
and one secondary link to its other parent. All links from a gateway
will be primary links.
Note the unique and important Back-up Node #2; this has only one
parent – the gateway. Its importance in the network is described
below.
