Adopting IEEE 802.11 MAC for industrial delay-sensitive wireless control and monitoring applications: A survey

In recent years, wireless communication has been widely adopted in the field of industrial systems. Compared with traditional wired control and monitoring systems, wireless control and monitoring systems are cost-effective and easy to deploy. On the other hand, IEEE 802.11-based wireless technology is widely applied in many areas due to its popularity, flexibility and ease of management, which makes it a good candidate for various industrial wireless control and monitoring applications with different requirements. However, real-time wireless control and monitoring applications usually have varying degrees of timeliness requirements, and the basic IEEE 802.11 MAC mechanism cannot support such requirements due to its inherent drawbacks. Therefore, in this paper we intend to produce a comprehensive survey and classification of the recent deterministic enhancement approaches in IEEE 802.11 networks, which can be applied in wireless control and monitoring systems with different real-time requirements. We explain each mechanism briefly, and give an extensive comparison of the features (especially the timeliness level) of all described MAC mechanisms. Finally, we conclude this paper by identifying some open research issues for future consideration.