Distributed Successive Packet Scheduling for Multi-Channel Real-Time Wireless Networks

With the rapid growth of industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications, real-time wireless networks (RTWNs) are playing an increasingly important role in providing realtime, reliable, and secure communication services for these applications. A key challenge in RTWN management is to ensure real-time Quality of Services (QoS), especially in the presence of unexpected external (i.e., application-side) and internal (i.e., network-side) disturbances. This paper presents a novel framework, DS-PaS, to determine the packet transmission schedule for multi-channel multi-hop RTWNs at the data link layer in a distributed and dynamic fashion. DS-PaS is able to (i) handle external disturbances, (ii) support spatial reuse, (iii) meet deadlines of all critical tasks, and (iv) minimize the number of dropped non-critical packets. To avoid transmission collisions when using inconsistent information in a distributed framework, DS-PaS incorporates several key advances in both the data-link layer protocol and algorithm design so that individual nodes can build on-line schedules with only local interference information. Extensive evaluation based on both testbed implementation and simulation validates the correctness of the DS-PaS design and demonstrates its effectiveness compared to the state of the art.