Combining reliability and timeliness in industrial wireless networks: An experimental assessment

Communication over the ether is by nature erratic and, consequently, wireless networks are unsuitable for hard real-time distributed control applications typical of industrial plants. However, scheduling strategies employed by real-time operating systems, along with channel redundancy and advanced bandwidth management, can be used to improve their determinism and make them suitable for soft real-time applications. This paper presents an approach that combines such techniques and a preliminary implementation, which relies on IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi), employed to assess its feasibility. Results show that data exchange determinism can be substantially improved towards the level required by many soft real-time applications.