A Distributed Real-time Scheduling System for Industrial Wireless Networks

Abstract

The concept of Industry 4.0 introduces the unification of industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT), cyber physical systems, and data-driven business modeling to improve production efficiency of the factories. To ensure high production efficiency, Industry 4.0 requires industrial IoT to be adaptable, scalable, real-time, and reliable. Recent successful industrial wireless standards such as WirelessHART appeared as a feasible approach for such industrial IoT. For reliable and real-time communication in highly unreliable environments, they adopt a high degree of redundancy. While a high degree of redundancy is crucial to real-time control, it causes a huge waste of energy, bandwidth, and time under a centralized approach and are therefore less suitable for scalability and handling network dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose DistributedHART - a distributed real-time scheduling system for WirelessHART networks. The essence of our approach is to adopt local (node-level) scheduling through a time window allocation among the nodes that allows each node to schedule its transmissions using a real-time scheduling policy locally and online. DistributedHART obviates the need of creating and disseminating a central global schedule in our approach, thereby significantly reducing resource usage and enhancing the scalability. To our knowledge, it is the first distributed real-time multi-channel scheduler for WirelessHART. We have implemented DistributedHART and experimented on a 130-node testbed. Our testbed experiments as well as simulations show at least 85% less energy consumption in DistributedHART compared to existing centralized approach while ensuring similar schedulability.