Adaptive and Contract Aware Configuration for Industrial Wireless Networks

Abstract

Planning the transmission routing and scheduling is a challenging issue in industrial wireless networks (IWN) due to high quality of service (QoS) requirements. Moreover, in many applications we face the problem of node mobility, changes of transmission conditions, node resource and powering limitations. This paper initially formulates the problem of searching optimal network configuration covering the outlined features and subsequently proposes an effective solution. It is designed for typical industrial FDMA and TDMA networks with horizontal communication. The goal of our studies is to find IWN configuration (routing, time slot and channel allocation) that maximizes the number of successfully concluded contracts. The presented method is compatible with the ISA100.11a standard and integrates relevant QoS requirements for different periodic and aperiodic contracts. Our approach is based on original deterministic algorithms for planning the traffic. They are optimized with a genetic algorithm and facilitate the adaptation to changing operation conditions of network nodes. Extensive simulation experiments have been used in the development and evaluation of the proposed algorithms. The introduced test environment and benchmarks confirmed the advantages of our approach and revealed drawbacks of other approaches.