Joint Design of Relay and Packet Combining Schemes for Wireless Industrial Networks

Wireless industrial networks differ in many respects from other types of wireless networks. In particular, since many applications impose tight real-time and reliability requirements at the same time, and packet sizes tend to be small. In this paper we design a simple and practically implementable protocol in which relaying and packet combining work together to improve the probability that packets are delivered within a prescribed deadline over fading channels. The results indicate that such a combination can be fruitfully employed in wireless industrial networks.