Analysis of Response Times in 802.11 Industrial Networks

Nowadays there is an ever increasing interest towards the use of wireless LANs in industrial environments, mainly because they do not require cabling, feature good connectivity and performance, and can be operated on by control applications in a very similar way to conventional Ethernet. However, WLANs have several drawbacks when compared to wired networks, the most severe being caused by the random access mechanism that worsen their determinism noticeably. In this paper a thorough analysis is carried out about the statistical distribution of response times in a real 802.11 g network, which can be used to characterize this solution when used to support non-critical real-time traffic.