Book excerpt: This book introduces the fundamentals of DCS, and shows how to include wireless technology in their design while guaranteeing the desired operation characteristics. The text also presents insights and results gained from extensive practical experience in implementing and testing systems within a specific industrial setting. Features: examines the operations that the DCS implements, covering human-machine interfaces, diagnostics and maintenance interfaces, and controllers; discusses industrial control system and wireless network protocols; reviews scheduling in wireless sensor networks; describes a latency model for heterogeneous DCS with wired and wireless parts, that predicts monitoring, command, and closed loop latencies; explains how to plan operation timings systematically; introduces measures and metrics for performance monitoring and debugging, and describes how to add these to a system; presents experimental results to validate the planning approach, based on an application test-bed.