Real-time mixed-traffic wireless networks

In this paper we introduce a new protocol, prioritized carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance, for real-time wireless local area networking. Wireless networks increasingly will be called upon to carry mixed traffic, some portion of which will be devoted to real-time control and monitoring. Our protocol, based upon the IEEE 802.11 wireless standard, mixes real-time traffic with standard multimedia data in a way which assures loop stability. Scheduling the real-time traffic is the primary issue considered. Under our framework, we propose and validate several new algorithms for dynamically scheduling the traffic of wireless networked control systems: constant penalty, estimated error order and lag first-order schemes. All algorithms are compared via simulation and the results show that dynamic scheduling algorithms achieve better system performance on average than static scheduling algorithms like fixed-order polling. The results of a real experiment involving two dryer plants and three IEEE 802.11 nodes are reported with static scheduling employed as it lower bounds the closed-loop behavior.