End-to-End Communication Delay Analysis in Industrial Wireless Networks

TLDR

WirelessHART is a new standard for real‑time, reliable communication between sensor and actuator devices in industrial process monitoring, and end‑to‑end delay analysis is needed to determine the schedulability of real‑time data flows for acceptance testing or workload adjustment. The study aims to analyze end‑to‑end communication delay in WirelessHART networks to assess the schedulability of real‑time data flows for acceptance testing or workload adjustment. The authors model the WirelessHART network as a real‑time multiprocessor system and apply response‑time analysis to derive an upper bound on each flow’s end‑to‑end delay. Simulations on random and real 74‑node testbed topologies show the method yields safe, reasonably tight upper bounds, enabling effective schedulability tests.

Abstract

WirelessHART is a new standard specifically designed for real-time and reliable communication between sensor and actuator devices for industrial process monitoring and control applications. End-to-end communication delay analysis for WirelessHART networks is required to determine the schedulability of real-time data flows from sensors to actuators for the purpose of acceptance test or workload adjustment in response to network dynamics. In this paper, we consider a network model based on WirelessHART, and map the scheduling of real-time periodic data flows in the network to real-time multiprocessor scheduling. We then exploit the response time analysis for multiprocessor scheduling and propose a novel method for the delay analysis that establishes an upper bound of the end-to-end communication delay of each real-time flow in the network. Simulation studies based on both random topologies and real network topologies of a <inline-formula><tex-math>$74$</tex-math></inline-formula> -node physical wireless sensor network testbed demonstrate that our analysis provides safe and reasonably tight upper bounds of the end-to-end delays of real-time flows, and hence enables effective schedulability tests for WirelessHART networks.