Message-based MAC accelerator for time-critical industrial communication

Designing wireless industrial communication for factory automation is a serious task because novel radio systems have to compete with well established wired fieldbus solutions. The requirements to achieve equivalent reliability and latencies impose challenging demands on design and implementation. In this paper, we propose a hardware accelerator for highly adaptive and parallel medium access allowing seamless integration and interoperation with existing fieldbus systems. A reference implementation of this medium access control (MAC) accelerator using parallel sequence spread spectrum (PSSS) as the physical layer technology is presented and analyzed for scalability and timing. The comparison between different kinds of network traffic in a parallel medium access reveals how the demands on acceleration are interrelated with the data timing requirements.