Joint Design of Routing and Scheduling for Maximizing Reliability of Multihop Transmissions in WirelessHART Networks

Abstract

WirelessHART is one of the most widely used wireless standards for industrial applications. In order to meet the high requirements of communication for reliability and real-timeliness, WirelessHART has adopted graph routing to allow retransmission from backup paths when necessary and time slotted channel hopping (TSCH) mechanism to improve reliability by leveraging channel diversity. In this paper, we formulate the problem of maximizing the transmission reliability of multiple flows in a multi-hop WirelessHART network. Considering the path diversity of graph routing, we analyze the characteristics of links that pass through different paths of the same flow. Based on this analysis, We propose an aggregation-based routing algorithm along with a hop-wise scheduling algorithm to solve the optimization problem. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations.