PREED: Packet REcovery by Exploiting the Determinism in Industrial WSN Communication

Abstract

The requirements of safety-critical wireless sensor network (WSN) applications, such as closed-loop control and traffic safety, cannot be met by the IEEE 802.15.4-2006 standard nor its industrial WSN (IWSN) derivatives. The main problem in that respect is the communication reliability, which is seriously compromised by 2.4-GHz interference, as well as multipath fading and attenuation (MFA) at industrial facilities. Meanwhile, communication blackouts in critical WSN applications may lead to devastating consequences, including production halts, damage to production assets and can pose a threat to safety of human personnel. This work presents PREED, a method to improve the reliability by exploiting the determinism in IWSN communication. The proposed solution is based on the analysis of bit error traces collected in real transmissions at four different industrial environments. A case study on Wireless HART packet format shows that PREED recovers 42%-134% more packets than the competing approaches on links compromised by WLAN interference. In addition, PREED reduces one of the most trivial causes of packet loss in IWSN, i.e. The corruption of frame length byte, by 88% and 99%, for links exposed to WLAN interference and MFA, respectively.