Exploiting time and frequency diversity in IEEE 802.15.4 industrial networks for enhanced reliability and throughput

Abstract

Industrial networks based on IEEE 802.15.4 are spreading, even though the joint requirement on predictability and reliability from industrial applications is hard to fulfil in wireless networks, and the data rate of IEEE 802.15.4 is rather low. With the goal of providing real-time guarantees, with increased reliability and throughput, we propose two multichannel network architectures based on IEEE 802.15.4 with predictable medium access, real-time analysis admission control and transport layer retransmissions. We evaluate the architectures in terms of reliability, utilization, delay, complexity, scalability and energy efficiency. The evaluations show that throughput and reliability can be enhanced through redundancy and concurrency in the frequency domain.