QWIN: Facilitating QoS in Wireless Industrial Networks Through Cooperation

For successfully establishing wireless communication in industrial environments, new approaches supporting the stringent requirements of industrial machine-to-machine communication are needed. Thereby, the main challenge is that different applications with distinct requirements compete against each other on the same wireless communication medium. Then again, an essential property of industrial scenarios is that the participating stations typically collaboratively work toward a common goal. In this paper, we thus investigate QWIN, a novel approach that leverages this cooperative nature by enabling the stations to share the scarce transmission resources. The stations hence offload their priority queues into the network and share them according to the quality-of-service requirements imposed by the overlying industrial applications. We implemented the cooperation mechanisms on prototypical hardware and evaluated them in a real-world testbed and by simulations. The evaluation reveals that our distributed decision approach effectively ensures that higher priority messages are conveyed more reliably within 1ms, without reducing the reliability of lower priority messages.