Title: Polling in the frequency domain: a new MAC protocol for industrial wireless network for factory automation

Authors: Junru Lin; Wei Liang; Haibin Yu; Yang Xiao

Addresses: Key Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China; University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China ' Key Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China ' Key Lab. of Networked Control Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China ' Department of Computer Science, The University of Alabama, 101 Houser Hall, Box 870290, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0290, USA

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.

Keywords: 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.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAHUC.2015.073434

International Journal of Ad Hoc and Ubiquitous Computing, 2015 Vol.20 No.4, pp.211 - 222

Received: 11 Sep 2013
Accepted: 07 Dec 2013
Published online: 08 Dec 2015 *

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