Optimization of Real-Time Transmission Reliability on Wireless Industrial Automation Networks

Reliable transmission of the control packets is one of the key requirements of deploying an Industrial Wireless Network (IWN) for automation purposes. The use of error-prone wireless channel, transmission of control packets having hard real-time traffic over IWN have made reliable transmission assurance highly challenging. This paper intends in addressing this challenge through reliability optimization of the hard real-time traffic transmitted over IWN. ReliaMAC is a novel scheme that is proposed to support reliable transmission of hard real-time traffic using redundancy bits added to each double MAC frame. Optimization of transmission reliability is used to identify the optimum number of nodes in an IWN that can support reliable transmission of the hard real-time traffic to a maximum extent. Network simulation results revealed the effectiveness of ReliaMAC in improving reliability of hard real-time communication on IWNs.