SchedWiFi: An innovative approach to support scheduled traffic in ad-hoc industrial IEEE 802.11 networks

The spread use of IEEE 802.11 networks in industrial automation raised the need to support multiple traffic classes with different requirements. This paper proposes a novel approach, called SchedWiFi, that provides flexible support to the scheduled traffic class, i.e., a high priority traffic class that is transmitted according to a fixed schedule, over IEEE 802.11 ad-hoc industrial networks. SchedWiFi operates on the IEEE 802.11n physical layer, thus providing high datarate, and supports multiple traffic classes with different priorities. SchedWiFi modifies the EDCA mechanism allowing to transmit scheduled traffic without requiring any predefined superframe structure, or timeslots, thus allowing for more flexible schedule of non-ST traffic.