A survey on time division multiple access scheduling algorithms for industrial networks

Abstract

In recent years, wireless networks have been widely adopted in industrial applications such as monitoring and control because of their flexibility and low cost. However, wireless networks use shared medium which require appropriate Media Access Control (MAC) protocols to manage the shared medium. Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA)-based MAC protocols, which are collision free are predominantly used in industrial networks. To achieve the stringent requirements of reliability and timeliness in industrial applications, proper scheduling of the nodes accessing the shared channel is essential. A number of TDMA scheduling algorithms have been proposed in the literature but there is no study that have analyzed and compared the algorithms to help designers of new algorithms with basic information of the existing algorithms. The objective of this study is to provide basic findings that should be used by researchers looking for TDMA scheduling algorithms for industrial applications. To achieve the objectives of this article various categories of the TDMA scheduling algorithms that have been implemented in various industrial networks mostly Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) which is widely deployed have been presented. Comparison of the various categories of the scheduling algorithms using reliability and delay as performance metrics which are crucial in industrial applications have been done. It was noted that hybrid TDMA scheduling algorithms have improved performance compared to distributed and centralized algorithms in random networks. Designing and testing of hybrid TDMA scheduling algorithms in the emerging industrial wireless networks such as LoRaWAN are recommended future work.