1. Seamless Link-level Redundancy to Improve Reliability of Industrial Wi-Fi Networks
- Author
-
Stefano Scanzio, Adriano Valenzano, and Gianluca Cena
- Subjects
FOS: Computer and information sciences ,redundant transmission ,Wi-Fi array ,Inter-Access Point Protocol ,Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing ,Computer science ,02 engineering and technology ,Wireless LAN controller ,Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture ,0202 electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering ,Redundancy (engineering) ,Wireless ,Electrical and Electronic Engineering ,Fixed wireless ,Wi-Fi ,Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) ,Network packet ,business.industry ,Wireless network ,industrial communications ,020208 electrical & electronic engineering ,020206 networking & telecommunications ,Computer Science Applications ,fault-tolerance ,Wireless site survey ,Key distribution in wireless sensor networks ,Control and Systems Engineering ,Link level ,business ,Random access ,Information Systems ,Computer network - 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., preprint, 13 pages (Winner of the "2017 Best Paper Award for the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics")
- Published
- 2022