Polling in the frequency domain: a new MAC protocol for industrial wireless network for factory automation

Abstract

Wireless technologies are becoming more and more attractive for industrial communication. In the field of factory automation, the high communication requirements in terms of predictability, reliability and real-time make the adoption of wireless technologies challenging, due to the inefficiency of the wireless physical layer and deterministic medium access control (MAC) protocols. In this paper, a frequency domain polling MAC protocol (FDP-MAC) is proposed, which takes advantage of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology to achieve simultaneously polling. In the FDP-MAC, a dynamic time division multiple access (TDMA) scheduling and a downlink acknowledgements aggregation method are also presented to improve the communication efficiency further. We validate the effectiveness of FDP-MAC through simulations, and results indicate that FDP-MAC can meet typical factory automation applications' communication requirements.