Performance analysis of cooperative ARQ systems for wireless industrial networks

The proliferation of wireless communications has lead to a high interest to establish this technology in industrial settings. The main arguments in favor of wireless are reduced costs in deployment and maintenance, as well as increased flexibility. In contrast to home and office environments, industrial settings include mission-critical machine-to-machine applications, demanding stringent requirements for reliability and latency in the area of 1-10-9 PDR and 1ms, respectively. One way to achieve both is cooperative Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ), which leverages spatial diversity. This paper presents a wireless multi-user Time Division Multiple Access system with cooperative ARQ for mission-critical communication. We evaluate two design options analytically, using an outage-capacity model, to investigate whether the relaying of messages should be performed centrally at a multi-antenna AP with perfect Channel State Information (CSI) or decentrally at simultaneously transmitting stations with average CSI. Results indicate that both options are able to achieve the targeted communication guarantees when a certain degree of diversity is implemented, showing a stable system performance even with an increasing number of stations.