PROJECT TITLE :

Seamless Link-Level Redundancy to Improve Reliability of Industrial Wi-Fi Networks

ABSTRACT:

The adoption of wireless communications and, in particular, Wi-Fi, at rock bottom level of the factory automation hierarchy has not increased as fast needless to say so way, mainly as a result of of significant problems regarding determinism. Actually, besides the random access theme, disturbance and interference stop reliable communication over the air and, as a matter of reality, build wireless networks unable to support distributed real-time management applications properly. Several papers recently appearing in literature suggest that diversity could be leveraged to overcome this limitation effectively. In this paper, a reference architecture is introduced, that describes how seamless link-level redundancy can be applied to Wi-Fi. The framework is general enough to function a basis for future protocol enhancements, and additionally includes two optimizations aimed at improving the quality of wireless communication by avoiding unnecessary replicated transmissions. Some relevant solutions are analyzed by means of an intensive simulation campaign, in order to focus on their advantages in comparison with standard Wi-Fi. Results show that each packet losses and network latencies improve noticeably.