Bandwidth management for soft real-time control applications in industrial wireless networks

Industrial distributed control systems would greatly benefit from the adoption of wireless communication technologies, if only guarantees could be provided on timing of time-critical data delivery over the ether. This paper presents solutions to handle single-hop deadline-constrained periodic traffic, which combine centralized transmission scheduling according to EDF and ARQ. For each solution, an admission control test is provided, which guarantees a configurable number of retries to each data instance within its deadline, statically addressing both timeliness and reliability on a per-instance basis. Dynamic bandwidth management strategies are also introduced that use runtime information about unperformed guaranteed retries and reassign them, as extra retries, to failed instances whose deadline has not yet expired. Simulation results show that significant benefits can be obtained, in terms of both determinism and improved performance, by a careful static/dynamic management of the available communication resources.