Analysis and Evaluation of Self-Organizing TDMA for Industrial Applications

Abstract

With the Industry 4.0 revolution, the inclusion of wireless communications with real-time requirements has been gaining popularity in industrial applications. As existing wireless technologies do not fully satisfy the stringent requirements of the most critical industrial applications, wired, centralized networks are often used. However, when the application requires mobility, there is no other way than to use wireless communications. Further, in applications where the topology changes dynamically and a large number of devices are mobile, centralized protocols are less suitable. Unfortunately, most decentralized medium access protocols are not predictable, and thereby not able to fulfil the real-time requirements. To address these challenges, in this paper Self-Organizing Time Division Multiple Access (STDMA) is analysed to assess its suitability for use in industrial applications. The analysis has been carried out through simulations under a multipath dispersed time-variant industrial channel while subject to a variable Doppler shift. To this end, several metrics such as channel access delay, slot occupation distribution (SOD), packet losses and packet inter-arrival time (PIAT) have been evaluated, using OMNeT++ in combination with the VEINS framework.