Low-Latency High-Reliability Industrial MAC Protocol for 6G Networks
Ahmed M. Salama, Bin Xie, Jayanta K. Debnath, Anup Kumar · 2023
To enable advanced manufacturing applications, reliable and low-latency communication is crucial between the sensors/actuators and the central controller. However, the current wireless communication protocols fall short in meeting these stringent requirements, thereby hindering the use of wireless sensors despite their low cost, flexibility, and productivity benefits compared to wired communication. This paper proposes a new wireless MAC protocol called L2Wireless that uses cooperative relaying and network coding to address these issues. Our goal is to design a protocol that can support at least ten sensors/actuators in a factory cell while achieving the desired latency and reliability. The L2Wireless MAC layer uses cooperative relay and network coding to ensure successful information exchange between the controller and actuators with constrained latency and reliability. We use practical channel measurements from NIST and industrial wireless systems radio propagation measurements to simulate the performance. Our results indicate that the L2Wireless protocol can support a sufficient number of devices within a work cell while simultaneously achieving the desired latency and reliability using cooperative relaying and network coding. Additionally, we show that the extra bit error rate (BER) required to achieve low latency and high reliability is minimal.