Towards High-Performance Wireless Control: $10^{-7}$ Packet Error Rate in Real Factory Environments

Abstract

To meet the extremely low latency constraints of industrial wireless control in critical applications, the wireless high-performance scheme (WirelessHP) has been introduced as a promising solution. The proposed design showed great improvements in terms of latency, but its performance in terms of reliability have not been fully tested yet. While traditional wireless systems achieve high reliability through packet retransmissions, this would impair the latency, and an approach based on channel coding is preferable in industrial applications. In this paper, a set of packet error rate (PER) tests is performed by applying concatenated Reed Solomon and convolutional codes to the WirelessHP physical layer, using a demonstrator based on a universal software radio peripheral platform. The effectiveness of channel coding to achieve 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-7</sup> level PER without retransmissions is shown in typical laboratory and factory environments.