Abstract
Communication for control-centric industrial applications is characterized by the requirements of very high reliability, very low and deterministic latency and high scalability. Typically, IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs), also known as Wi-Fi networks, are deemed ineligible for industrial control applications owing to insufficient reliability and non-deterministic latency. This paper proposes a novel solution for providing reliable and deterministic communication, through Wi-Fi, in industrial environments. The proposed solution, termed as $\mathsf{HAR}^{\mathsf{2}}\mathsf{D-Fi}$ ( H ybrid channel A ccess with R edundancy for R eliable and D eterministic Wi- Fi ), adopts hybrid channel access mechanisms for achieving deterministic communication. It also provides temporal redundancy for enhanced reliability. $\mathsf{HAR}^{\mathsf{2}}\mathsf{D-Fi}$ implements different medium access control (MAC) designs that build on the standard physical (PHY) layer. Such designs can be classified into two categories: (a) MAC designs with pre-defined (physical) time-slotted schedule, and (b) MAC designs with virtual time-slotted schedule. Performance evaluation, based on analysis and system-level simulations, demonstrates the viability of $\mathsf{HAR}^{\mathsf{2}}\mathsf{D-Fi}$ for control-centric industrial applications.
Highlights
Communication in industrial control networks [1] demands very high reliability, very low latency with deterministic guarantees and high scalability for supporting a large number of devices [2]
The PHY layer in the generation Wi-Fi standard, i.e., IEEE 802.11ax [11] is based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) which provides additional benefits for industrial communication
medium access control (MAC) DESIGN 3: WINDOW-BASED distributed coordination function (DCF) The third MAC design is based on the concept of restricted access window (RAW) which was first proposed in the IEEE 802.11ah-2016 standard [22]
Summary
Communication in industrial control networks [1] demands very high reliability, very low latency with deterministic guarantees and high scalability for supporting a large number of devices (sensors, actuators, etc.) [2]. The PHY layer in the generation Wi-Fi standard, i.e., IEEE 802.11ax [11] is based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) which provides additional benefits for industrial communication. It makes transmissions more resilient to frequency selective fading and interference It allows partitioning of wide channels into smaller channels which is ideal for low-bandwidth industrial applications. For adoption in Wi-Fi, PRP requires devices with dual radios, which may not always be feasible for low-cost sensors and actuators in industrial environments It requires a packet/frame duplication entity at higher layers of the protocol stack for packet duplication and duplicate detection. The proposed solution, termed as HAR2D-Fi, adopts hybrid channel access schemes for deterministic communication It implements a redundancy mechanism for enhanced reliability. We conduct a comprehensive performance evaluation (Section V) of HAR2D-Fi based on numerical and simulation studies
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