Robust multicast scheme for wireless process control on traffic light networks

Abstract

This paper designs and analyzes the performance of an efficient and robust multicast scheme for the grid-style wireless network built upon the WirelessHART protocol, aiming at improving the reliability of wireless process control without extending the slot assignment schedule. The proposed scheme first makes the controller node select the transmission order to its downstream neighbors according to the current channel condition returned from the clear channel assessment. Next, receiver nodes having two predecessors listen first from the primary sender and then switches to the secondary sender when the message doesn't arrive within the predefined time bound. The simulation result obtained from the discrete event scheduler shows that the proposed scheme can improve the multicast delivery ratio by up to 35.6 %, compared with the multicast tree-based scheme having the same slot schedule, maintaining the consecutive message losses below 8. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.