Reliable and Real-Time Communication in Industrial Wireless Mesh Networks

Industrial wireless mesh networks are deployed in harsh and noisy environments for process measurement and control applications. Compared with wireless community networks, they have more stringent requirements on communication reliability and real-time performance. Missing or delaying of the process data by the network may severely degrade the overall control performance. In this paper, we abstract the primary reliability requirements in typical industrial wireless mesh networks and define three types of reliable routing graphs for different communication purposes. We present efficient algorithms to construct them and describe the recovery mechanisms in the event of component failures. Based on these graphs, data link layer communication schedules are generated to achieve end-to-end real-time performance. We demonstrate through extensive experimental results that our algorithms can achieve highly reliable routing, improved communication latency and stable real-time communication in large-scale networks at the cost of modest overhead in device configuration.