Congestion Control for Industrial Wireless Communication Gateway

The wireless communication technologies, such as wireless sensor network, can bring great economic benefits to industrial plants. But the open channel and multi-hop network topology will influence its real-time and reliable performance. Funneling effect is a kind of congestion caused by the wireless hop-by-hop and many-to-one networks. IEEE802.15.4 is a wireless personal area network standard that can be used in industry field monitoring and control. An industrial wireless communication protocol for factory automation systems is presented based on IEEE802.15.4. To solve the funneling effect, an on-demand TDMA is expanded in the Media Access Control layer superframe of the gateways and a priority-based communication scheduling mechanism is adopted in the routing devices near the gateways. The analysis shows this technique can be compatible with IEEE802.15.4, avoid the funneling effect, guarantee the communication performance and satisfy the requirements of the industrial applications.