INFLATE: Incremental wireless transmission for sensor information in industrial environments

As smart factory trends gain momentum, there is a growing need for robust information transmission protocols that make available sensor information gathered by individual machines and enable their algorithmic exploitation. Wireless transmission enables often-called-for flexibility, yet it poses challenges for reliable and timely transmission of information. This paper proposes a wireless transmission scheme for sensor information of production cycles in industrial environments. We include a preview functionality based on a discrete cosine transform that allows for rapid detection of problematic characteristics. The transmitted information's precision is improved using incremental updates as wireless capacity permits. Further, we include compact meta data that allows receivers to bound the received information's error. Evaluation results show that, even with high packet loss, characteristic features of sensor information are available early, and that error bounds closely follow the actual error.