A fast industrial WLAN protocol and its MAC implementation for factory communication systems

In this work, an industrial Wireless Local Area Network (iWLAN) system used to control industrial robots (iRBs) in factory automation (FA) environments is addressed. For fast and deterministic communication, we propose a synchronous multi-user round-robin transmission protocol. To reduce the overhead caused by the conventional multiple downlink access, we also propose a low overhead Packet Division Multiple Access (PDMA) technique. The analysis and simulation results show that our proposals provide 100% and 300% better throughput than the conventional industrial Point Coordination Function (iPCF) and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) protocol schemes, respectively. In particular, with the control duration per iRB of being better than 100 μsec, the proposal completely satisfies the demand for fast control of FA systems. Furthermore, the hardware architecture of MAC layer of iWLAN system is also proposed and designed to successfully implement the proposed protocol.