The use of clustered wireless multihop networks in industrial settings

This paper suggests a cluster collision avoidance mechanism and a dual transceiver architecture to be used in a clustered wireless multihop network. These two contributions make the clustered wireless multihop network the preferred architecture for future industrial wireless networks. The wireless multihop cluster consists of one master and several slaves, where some of the slaves will act as gateways between different clusters. Frequency hopping spread spectrum is used on a cluster level and to avoid frequency collisions between clusters a "neighbor cluster collision avoidance mechanism" is proposed and evaluated through simulations. To break up the dependence between the clusters, introduced by the gateway nodes, each node is equipped with two transceivers. The paper is concluded with a suggestion to use a clustered wireless multihop network with orthogonal hopping sequences for an industrial setting.