Polling-based MAC protocols for improving real-time performance in a wireless PROFIBUS

The idea of having a wireless PROFIBUS is appealing, since this can bring benefits like reduced cabling need and mobile stations to the factory floor. However, unfortunately, wireless transmission is error prone, which affects the timeliness and reliability behavior users expect from a fieldbus system (hard real time). In this paper, we compare two different approaches for the medium access control (MAC) and link layer of a wireless PROFIBUS system with respect to their so-called real-time performance in the presence of transmission errors. Specifically, we compare the existing PROFIBUS MAC and link layer protocol with a simple round-robin protocol. It is shown that round-robin delivers significantly better real-time performance than the PROFIBUS protocol under bursty error conditions. In a second step, we propose three add-ons to round-robin and we show that they further increase the real-time performance of round-robin. The add-ons take certain characteristics of the wireless medium into account.