Seamless Link-level Redundancy to Improve Reliability of Industrial
Wi-Fi Networks
- Gianluca Cena ,
- Stefano Scanzio ,
- Adriano Valenzano
Abstract
The adoption of wireless communications and, in particular, Wi-Fi, at
the lowest level of the factory automation hierarchy has not increased
as fast as expected so far, mainly because of serious issues concerning
determinism. Actually, besides the random access scheme, disturbance and
interference prevent reliable communication over the air and, as a
matter of fact, make wireless networks unable to support distributed
real-time control applications properly. Several papers recently
appeared in the literature suggest that diversity could be leveraged to
overcome this limitation effectively.
In this paper a reference architecture is introduced, which describes
how seamless link-level redundancy can be applied to Wi-Fi. The
framework is general enough to serve as a basis for future protocol
enhancements, and also includes two optimizations aimed at improving the
quality of wireless communication by avoiding unnecessary replicated
transmissions. Some relevant solutions have been analyzed by means of a
thorough simulation campaign, in order to highlight their benefits when
compared to conventional Wi-Fi. Results show that both packet losses and
network latencies improve noticeably.Apr 2016Published in IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics volume 12 issue 2 on pages 608-620. 10.1109/TII.2016.2522768