Network coding for reliable downlink transmissions in industrial wireless sensor and actuator networks
Jing Tao Yue, Svetlana Girs, Johan Åkerberg, Mats Björkman, Zihuai Lin · 2016
Benefits, such as significant reduction of cost and complexity, brought by wireless communication make wireless networks more and more appealing for industrial applications. However, before wireless systems can be deployed in industrial networks, strict industrial requirements on reliability and timeliness must be fulfilled and thus protocols increasing the performance of wireless communication are needed. Data in industrial systems is typically transmitted in two directions: from sensor nodes to a controller (uplink transmission) and from the controller to actuators (downlink transmission). Several previous studies have looked at possibilities of performance increase in uplink transmissions from the sensors, while not that much work focused on downlink transmissions, which are equally important. Thus, this paper addresses the downlink transmission scenario and presents a new protocol introducing network coding into packet forwarding scheme. Simulation results show that packet reception rate can be increased when network coding is applied.