AIRCoN-Stack - Introducing Flexibility to Wireless Industrial Real-Time Applications

Abstract

Wireless networking is a key technology to enable smart production scenarios. It expands the design space for solutions in factory design tremendously. Currently, applications suitable for wireless connections are limited to monitoring purposes due to lacking reliability. This is especially critical when the network needs to adjust to new application needs, environmental conditions or network topologies. In such cases real-time conditions required for certain tasks might break. To overcome those limitations we present AIRCoN-stack. It was specifically designed to perform real-time operations while parts of the network are changing. It uses TDMA with a combined radio- and CPU-scheduler to keep the task execution jitter between nodes in the network as low as possible. We evaluate all components of our network stack in a real-world setup to prove its capabilities.