Achieving Hybrid Wired/Wireless Industrial Networks with WDetServ: Reliability-Based Scheduling for Delay Guarantees

Industrial control systems are foreseen to operate over hybrid wired/wireless networks. While the controller will be deployed in the wired network, sensors and actuators will be deployed in a wireless sensor network (WSN). To support QoS for control systems, an end-to-end delay bound and a target reliability must be provided in both wireless and wired domains. However, for industrial WSNs, guaranteeing reliability is a challenging task because of low-power communications and the harsh wireless environment. In this work, we present the first QoS framework for arbitrary hybrid wired/wireless networks, which guarantees that the delay bound and the target reliability of each application are provided. As part of this framework, we propose the first reliability-based scheduler for WSN able to achieve a target reliability in the presence of dynamic interference. Simulations of the proposed scheduler prove its suitability in different interference scenarios and motivate further work.