WICKPro: A Hard Real-Time protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks with chain topologies

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) with chain topologies are very useful in road and railroad transportation or in tunnel and mine applications. The proposed protocols for WMNs usually support best-effort traffic or some kind of Quality of Service (QoS). However, some applications such as remotecontrolled machines in industrial control networks have Hard Real-Time (HRT) requirements, i.e., strict deadlines. Moreover, voice, video and data communications can be added to HRT traffic in order to provide them with reserved bandwidth and bounded latency. For this reason, this paper presents WICKPro (WIreless Chain networK Protocol), a HRT protocol for WMNs with chain topologies. WICKPro is a token-passing approach and is based on the ideas of the Timed-token protocol and the cyclic executive. We have designed this protocol to work on top of IEEE 802.11, made a testbed using commercial 802.11 wireless cards and compared the protocol's performance with the 802.11 protocol and three specific protocols for WMNs with chain topologies.

A Survey on Real-Time Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…At the MAC layer, hybrid TDMA/CSMA window is employed where all infrastructure nodes transmit only within their preassigned TDMA slots and noninfrastructure nodes transmit only within the CSMA to avoid interference between them. Another applicable real-time communication to WSN was proposed by Aísa and Villarroel [33]. Even though Wireless Chain networK Protocol (WICKPro) was proposed for wireless mesh networks with chain topology, its token passing approach and time-token protocol as well as cyclic executive can be implemented in WSN.…”

Container Security Device Chain Network for Safe Railway Transportation

“…The previous studies [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]13] resolve transmission errors by an explicit ACK or do not clearly mention the resolution. The use of an explicit ACK might aggravate the problem due to the increasing overhead.…”

“…WICKPro [13] is based on the similar motivation to the proposed method. It is a hard real-time protocol for wireless mesh networks with a chain topology, targeting road and railway transportation.…”