Relaying with Packet Aggregation for Half-Duplex All-to-All Broadcast in Time-Critical Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless automation and control networks, with stringent latency and reliability requirements, typically use half-duplex communications combined with deadline-aware scheduling of time slots to nodes. To introduce higher reliability in legacy industrial control systems, extra time slots are usually reserved for retransmissions. However, in distributed wireless control systems, where sensor data from several different nodes must be timely and reliably available at all places where controller decisions are made, this is particularly cumbersome as all nodes may not hear each other and extra time slots imply increased delay. To enable all-to-all broadcast with manageable overhead and complexity in such systems, we therefore propose a novel relaying strategy using packet aggregation. The strategy assigns relayers to time slots, as well as determines which packets to aggregate in each slot, using a low-complexity algorithm such that ultra-reliable communications can be obtained with maintained end- to-end latency.