A Coordination Architecture for Wireless Industrial Automation

Wireless communication offers higher flexibility, and reduced deployment and maintenance costs compared to traditional fieldbus technologies for industrial automation applications. Unfortunately, existing wireless solutions are neither able to satisfy the communication nor the scalability requirements of realistic industrial automation deployments. In this paper, we propose a two-tier architecture for radio resource coordination and management to support mission-critical wireless communication and scalability in industrial automation scenarios. In particular, our architecture supports both exclusive spectrum and shared spectrum paradigms. It allows spectral interference mitigation among multiple radio cells as well as coexistence among different operating technologies in order to achieve the required high reliability and low latency communication. Furthermore, it entails the essential functionalities to achieve efficient and scalable radio resource coordination.