Robust Data Transmissions Utilizing Multiple Access Points Reception and Packet-Level FEC

When we employ wireless communications in a factory, its channel state can change dynamically due to factory-specific propagation environments. Therefore, it is difficult to realize a stable communication link with common unicast transmissions. In order to realize stable communications in such an environment, in this paper, we focus on broadcast transmissions, where a sender transmits a packet to multiple access points (APs). With broadcast transmissions, even if an AP is not able to receive data because of bad channel conditions, the other APs may receive it, which can contribute to the realization of robust data transmissions. However, link reliability of broadcast transmissions is inherently low due to the absence of ACK and retransmission mechanisms. In order to solve this problem, in this paper, we apply packet-level FEC to broadcast transmissions. With computer simulations and actual indoor experiments, we investigate the effectiveness of broadcast transmissions exploiting multiple AP receptions with packet-level FEC.