Real-Time Cooperative Communication for Automation Over Wireless

• Published in: IEEE transactions on wireless communications Vol. 16; no. 11; pp. 7168 - 7183
• Main Authors: Swamy, Vasuki Narasimha, Suri, Sahaana, Rigge, Paul, Weiner, Matthew, Ranade, Gireeja, Sahai, Anant, Nikolic, Borivoje
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-11-2017
• Subjects: Cooperative communication; diversity; Frequency diversity; high-reliability wireless; Industrial control; IoT; low-latency; Protocols; Reliability; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1536-1276; 1558-2248
• DOI: 10.1109/TWC.2017.2741485

High-performance industrial automation systems rely on tens of simultaneously active sensors and actuators and have stringent communication latency and reliability requirements. Current wireless technologies, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE are unable to meet these requirements, forcing the use of wired communication in industrial control systems. This paper introduces a wireless communication protocol that capitalizes on multiuser diversity and cooperative communication to achieve the ultra-reliability with a low-latency constraint. Our protocol is analyzed using the communication-theoretic delay-limitedcapacity framework and compared with baseline schemes that primarily exploit frequency diversity. For a scenario inspired by an industrial printing application with 30 nodes in the control loop, 20-B messages transmitted between pairs of nodes and a cycle time of 2 ms, an idealized protocol can achieve a cycle failure probability (probability that any packet in a cycle is not successfully delivered) lower than 10 -9 with nominal SNR below 5 dB in a 20-MHz wide channel.