A Fast and Safe Industrial WLAN Communication Protocol for Factory Automation Control 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 safe communications, we first propose a synchronous multi-user round-robin transmission protocol. To reduce the overhead caused by the conventional multi-user downlink transmission technique, we then propose a low overhead Packet Division Multiple Access (PDMA) transmission technique. The numerical and simulation results indicate that our approaches increase speed of 100% and 300% throughput compared to the conventional industrial Point Coordination Function (iPCF) and Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) approaches, respectively. Besides, our approaches also provide lower system error rate (SER) than conventional ones. In particular, the control duration per iRB in our iWLAN system is faster than 100μsec. Therefore, our proposed schemes can achieve fast and safe performance for FA communication systems.