EchoRing: A Low-Latency, Reliable Token-Passing MAC Protocol for Wireless Industrial Networks
Christian Dombrowski, James Gross · RWTH Publications (RWTH Aachen) · 2015
Spurred by recent industrial trends, such as factoryautomation or phase synchronization in the smart grid, thereis a significant interest for wireless industrial networks lately.In contrast to traditional applications, the focus is on carryingout communication at very short latencies together with highreliabilities. Meeting such extreme requirements with wirelessnetworks is challenging. A potential candidate for such a networkis a token-passing protocol, as it allows to bound latencies.However, it lacks mechanisms to cope with the dynamics ofwireless channels. In this paper, we present EchoRing, a novelwireless token-passing protocol. Cooperative communication andan improved fault tolerance allow this decentralized protocol tosupport industrial applications over wireless networks. Based onexperimental results, we demonstrate the suitability of EchoRingto support demands of industrial applications. EchoRing outper-forms other schemes by several orders of magnitude in terms ofreliability for latencies of and below10ms.