Polling in the frequency domain: a new MAC protocol for industrial wireless network for factory automation. (2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Lin, Junru; Liang, Wei; Yu, Haibin; Xiao, Yang
• Is Part Of: International journal of ad hoc and ubiquitous computing. Volume 20:Number 4(2015)
• Page Start: 211
• Page End: 222
• Publication Date: 2015
• Subjects: industrial networks -- wireless networks -- factory automation -- MAC -- medium access control -- OFDM -- orthogonal frequency division multiplexing -- polling protocols -- frequency domain polling -- time division multiple access -- TDMA scheduling -- simulation -- factory communications; Ubiquitous computing -- Periodicals; Embedded computer systems -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing -- Distributed processing -- Periodicals; Wireless communication systems -- Periodicals; Computer architecture -- Periodicals; 004.2
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1743-8225

Abstract

Wireless technologies are becoming more and more attractive for industrial communication. In the field of factory automation, the high communication requirements in terms of predictability, reliability and real-time make the adoption of wireless technologies challenging, due to the inefficiency of the wireless physical layer and deterministic medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, a frequency domain polling MAC protocol (FDP-MAC) is proposed, which takes advantage of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology to achieve simultaneously polling. In the FDP-MAC, a dynamic time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling and a downlink acknowledgements aggregation method are also presented to improve the communication efficiency further. We validate the effectiveness of FDP-MAC through simulations, and results indicate that FDP-MAC can meet typical factory automation applications' communication requirements.