Study of traffic conditions for a fleet of mobiles moving within a wireless cell in an industrial environment

Assembly lines are long chains of devices that build, transform and merge products. These lines need to be constantly monitored and controlled at various levels. We envision a team of mobiles to perform such tasks, in addition to conveying products or assisting workers. The mobiles communicate wirelessly to an access point (AP), and periodically report their status and informations about their tasks. In this paper, we study the communication performance of such mobiles, both in a real and a simulated industrial environment. The main obstacle to the simulation is the lack of a realistic propagation model for industrial environments. We show with real measurements that usual path loss models used in simulation do not fit real measurements. We propose a split-model where two sets of parameters are used in the path loss model. Since we use the infrastructure mode, every communication involves the AP. Based on this model, we analyze the impact of low-level MAC-layer parameters on throughput, end-to-end delay and loss rate.