Design Guidelines to Improve Reliability of Seamless Redundancy in Wi-Fi Networks

Seamless redundancy has been recently proven to increase the quality of wireless links communication noticeably. As such, it can be exploited to improve Wi-Fi reliability and make it suitable for industrial environments. Higher benefits can be achieved when phenomena affecting transmissions on the two channels of a redundant link are independent. In this paper, a number of aspects that may lead to a reduction of the effectiveness of seamless redundancy are analyzed. In particular, the quality of communication has been experimentally evaluated in a real testbed made up of conventional Wi-Fi devices. Guidelines are then provided, which are aimed at preventing joint interference through a careful system design.