A novel wireless LAN protocol for factory automation control

Abstract

In this paper, a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) solution for the industrial communication system utilized in the factory automation (FA) environment is addressed. In the FA field, the communication mechanism which is intended to the short frame transmissions under real-time, safety and fair distribution between the industrial robots (iRBs) is now being investigated. We offer two proposals to achieve such goals. 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. For protocol scheme, the analysis results show that, under safety period constraint our proposal incredibly improves the throughput as compared with that of the conventional industrial Point Coordination Function (iPCF). For multiple DL access scheme, the simulation results prove that the offered PDMA technique provides much better than conventional Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) technique on both Packet Error Rate (PER) and throughput. Further, with the accomplishment of being better than 100 microseconds (μs) for the control duration per iRB, the proposed techniques completely satisfy the real time requirement for our FA control system.