Performance analysis of producer/consumer protocols over IEEE802.11 wireless links

Thanks to recent technological advances, wireless networks are beginning to represent an interesting opportunity for factory communication systems. Among the off-the-shelves solutions for radio communications, the IEEE802.11 technology is one of the most promising. However, industrial applications typically impose severe requirements in terms of both real-time performances and dependability. We consider one of the most popular models of field-bus protocols, namely the producer-consumer, and study the possibility of implementing it on top of IEEE802.11, protocol suite. After a description of how the producer-consumer services could be mapped onto IEEE802.11, we introduce an analytical model, which enables us to evaluate two important performance indexes: the update time jitter and the mean alarm latency. The analysis is validated by means of numerical simulations.