Low‐Latency High‐reliability Wireless Protocol for Advanced Manufacturing Applications

Advanced manufacture requires low-latency and high-reliability wireless communications between the sensors/actuators and the central controller. However, the current wireless protocols cannot meet such stringent latency and reliability requirements. In this project, InfoBeyond advocates L2Wireless (Low-Latency High-reliability Wireless Protocol Using Cooperative Relaying and Network Coding) to address this problem. It can simultaneously address the stringent requirements on latency (close-loop sense-to-actuation time < 1ms) and reliability within a factory cell with at least 10 sensor/actuators. For this goal, L2Wireless modifies the MAC and PHY layers of IEEE802.11ac, which includes radio diversity, scheduling, baseband processing, RF band selection, antenna selection, modulation and error coding, etc. The key features are: (i) L2Wireless PHY layer is developed based on the PHY techniques of IEEE802.11ac with adjustments to adapt to the latency/reliability requirements and radio environments of manufacturing applications; (ii) L2Wireless MAC layer utilizes cooperative relay and network coding to ensure successful information exchange between the controller and sensors/actuators with constrained latency and reliability; (iii) Our preliminary results indicate that L2Wireless protocol is able to support the communications of sufficient number of devices within a work cell and simultaneously achieve the desired latency and reliability for advanced manufacturing applications.