Deterministic and event triggered MAC protocol for industrial wireless networks

Abstract

Recent years have endorsed momentous development in the industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks (IWSN) for real time communication. For industrial automation application these wireless networks like ZigBee and wireless HART indeed propose advantages in term of cost and flexibility, but the price to be paid is lower reliability in term of unpredictable delay time and lower throughput. In this paper a new mechanism known as wireless arbitration, is proposed for the nodes to access medium in the wireless sensor and actuator network according to their priority. In this new mechanism a specific arbitration frequency is allotted to each node according to the priority of the node in the network, so the node interested to access the medium will transmit its frequency for a fixed amount of time, and all the transmitted frequencies will be received by each node. The received frequencies will then be compared to give the medium access to the high priority node. This mechanism makes the delay deterministic by allocating the medium to the highest priority node in fixed arbitration time, which improves maximum throughput, minimum delay and bandwidth efficiency with allowing event based medium access.