A fast and safety industrial WLAN protocol for factory communication systems

Abstract

In this paper, an industrial Wireless Local Area Network (iWLAN) solution applied to control industrial robots (iRBs) in the factory automation (FA) environment is addressed. The fast and safety are the goals of our proposed system. The first proposal is an advanced round-robin iWLAN transmission protocol whose operation is strictly controlled by a precise synchronous scheduling mechanism. The second offer is a novel multiple downlink (DL) access, called Packet Division Multiple Access (PDMA) that removes significant overheads caused by traditional multiple access techniques. The simulation results show that the proposals incredibly improve the throughput as compared with that of the conventional industrial Point Coordination Function (iPCF) and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) protocol schemes. Besides, our system also proves that it provides much less System Error Rate (SER), i.e. secures more safety, than those conventional ones under the same working environment. Further, with the accomplishment of being better than 100 μsec for the control duration per iRB, the proposal makes it completely satisfy an FA system demand on both fast and safety requirements.