A Bandwidth-Efficient MAC Scheme for Mission-Critical Applications in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) have the potential to contribute significantly to a variety of wireless sensing endpoints, such as cable replacement, mobility, flexibility and cost reduction. However, the harsh and varied industrial environment entails addressing severe challenges, such as dust, heat, electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radio frequency interference from the other heterogeneous networks. One of the important challenges is the link burstiness in industrial wireless environments, which has not been heavily researched. In this paper, we propose a new timeslot scheduling algorithm to address this problem. The algorithm allows transmissions on the same link to be separated at least by a minimum timeslot distance. Moreover, to provide a synergistic complement to the timeslot scheduling, we also propose a timeslot reuse scheme, which facilitates improved efficiency and reliability in the bandwidth utilization and retransmission and decreases the average delay of the packet arrival. We evaluate the proposed algorithm and scheme by a real implementation, targeting a specific industrial application. The experimental results generally indicate that the proposed media access control (MAC) scheme greatly improves the reliability and decreases the packet arrival delay. Compared with the existing popular methods, the execution of our scheme indicates a minimal link burstiness influence and possesses more efficient bandwidth utilization.