A Centralized Controller for Reliable and Available Wireless Schedules in Industrial Networks

Abstract

This paper describes our work on a flexible centralized controller for scheduling wireless networks. The context of this work encompasses wireless networks within the wider Internet of Things (IoT) field and in particular addresses the requirements and limitations within the narrower Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) sub-field. The overall aim of this work is to produce wireless networking solutions for industrial applications. The challenges include providing high reliability and low latency guarantees, comparable to existing wired solutions, within a noisy wireless medium and using generally computationally- and energy-restrained network nodes. We describe the development of a centralized controller for Wireless Industrial Networks, currently aimed at IEEE Std 802.15.4-2015 Time Slotted Channel Hopping protocol. Our controller takes a high-level network-centric problem description as input, translates it to a low-level representation and uses that to retrieve a solution from a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver, translating the solution back to a higher-level network-centric representation. The advantages of our solution are the ability to gain the added flexibility, higher ease of deployment, and lower deployment cost offered by wireless networks by generating configurable and flexible schedules for these applications.