A Reliable Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

With the success of wireless technologies in consumer electronics, standard wireless technologies are envisioned to be deployed in industrial environments as well. Many industrial applications have stringent requirements on reliability and timing. In wired environments, reliability is well catered by field-bus systems. When wireless links are adopted, reliability requirement is significantly more difficult to be fulfilled due to the adverse properties of the radio channels. In this paper, a novel reliable routing protocol for industrial wireless networks is proposed. Based on the idea of cross-layer design, a new layer (CBF_A) is inserted between MAC layer and network layer, which can provide the information of link quality to network layer. Our experiments prove that the new protocol is superior in both cost and reliability.