REALFLOW: Reliable Real-Time Flooding-Based Routing Protocol for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless technologies have been increasingly applied in industrial automation systems due to flexible installation, mobility, and cost reduction. Unlike traditional wireless sensor networks (WSNs), industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs), when expanding from wireless monitoring to wireless control, have more stringent requirements on reliability, real-time performance, and robustness in a number of industrial applications. Successive transmission failures or deadline misses in these applications may severely degrade the control quality and result in serious economic losses and safety problems. Therefore, when deploying IWSNs in harsh industrial environments, to achieve reliable and deterministic end-to-end transmissions is critically important. In this paper, we explain the primary challenges of designing appropriate routing protocols and present a reliable real-time flooding-based routing protocol for IWSNs (REALFLOW). Instead of traditional routing tables, related node lists are generated in a simple distributed manner, serving for packet forwarding. A controlled flooding mechanism is applied to improve both reliability and real-time performance. A seamless transition in the event of topology change can be achieved by REALFLOW. Performance evaluations via simulations verify that significant improvements of reliability, real-time performance, and network recovery time can be achieved by REALFLOW, compared with traditional routing protocols.

Will 5G become yet another wireless technology for industrial automation?

“…Recent research results also show that WirelessHART can support safety-critical applications with latencies below 50ms [27], [28].…”

A priority-aware frequency domain polling MAC protocol for OFDMA-based networks in cyber-physical systems

“…Architecture of FDP-MAC protocol [25] . deadlines (termed as outdated packets) are of limited use for industrial system and usually discarded by stations [32] . Consequently, low packet delivery ratio may lead the automation process to suffer destructive influences, e.g., an outage of the production line, a damage of the factory machine and even the loss of workers' lives.…”

Realization and measurements of industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks

“…Furthermore, to avoid timeslot instability, any node should only synchronize with the parent node who is the closest one to the network manager. 4) REALFLOW Implementation: To provide reliable and real-time communication, we applied REALFLOW routing protocol proposed in [10]. In order to make the REALFLOW protocol fit for real IWSANs, we adapted this protocol with several updates.…”

“…After related node lists L and downlink node lists N down being respectively generated in each intermediate node, RE-ALFLOW is able to forward both data packets and management packets. The rest of REALFLOW implementation strictly follows the description in [10], so more details of REALFLOW can be found in this previous work. 5) Timeslot Management: Since the TDMA scheme is applied on the datalink layer, timeslots need to be scheduled for all nodes for conflict-free communication.…”