Phase Switching Mechanism for WiFi-based Long Distance Networks in Industrial Real-Time Applications

High-quality industrial control is critical to ensuring production quality, reducing production costs, improving management levels and stabilizing equipment and long-term operations. WiFi-based Long Distance (WiLD) networks have been used as remote industrial control networks. Real-time performance is essential to industrial control. However, the original mechanism of WiLD networks does not minimize end-to-end delay and restricts improvement of real-time performance. In this paper, we propose two algorithms to obtain the transmitting/receiving phase cycle length for each node such that real time constraints can be satisfied and phase switching overhead can be minimized. The first algorithm is based on the branch and bound method, which identifies an optimal solution. The second is a fast heuristic algorithm. The experimental results show that the execution time of the algorithm based on branch and bound is less than that of the heuristic algorithm when the network is complex and that the performance of the heuristic algorithm is close to the optimal solution.