A Novel QoS-Aware Multi-Connectivity Scheme for Wireless IIoT

Wireless technology is envisioned to be a major enabler of flexible industrial deployments, allowing agile installations and mobility of production elements. However, for industrial IoT (IIoT) use-cases, reliability and service availability remain as key concerns for wide adoption. To enhance wireless link reliability, we propose in this paper a Selective Duplication with QoS (SDQoS) technique, a cross-layer scheduling solution which leverages radio access technology metrics and transport layer metrics to schedule data transmission across one or more links. The framework is implemented as part of a multi-access gateway solution and its capability is demonstrated in a realistic two-hall industrial production environment for a multi-data flow autonomous mobile robot use-case, using Wi-Fi. The proposed QoS-aware solution shows a major improvement in preserving low latency and reliability for critical control data in the presence of large background traffic as compared to state-of-the-art solutions.