Cognitive radio for improved reliability in a real-time wireless MAC protocol based on TDMA

Wireless communications enables introduction of Internet of Things (IoT) in industrial networks. Unfortunately, real-time guarantees required for many IoT applications, may be compromised in wireless networks due to an unreliable transmission medium. A key component in enabling real-time communications is the medium access control (MAC) layer and its ability to effectively avoid concurrent transmissions that causes deadline misses. Also, deploying the network in a harsh interference environment can lead to low reliability. Time diversity, based on transmitting several copies of the same data at different instants, increases reliability but at the expense of increased jitter and bandwidth. A more efficient resource utilization is expected from cognitive radio, which dynamically takes into account the status of the wireless environment before performing transmissions. This paper proposes a wireless MAC protocol based on scheduled timeslots to avoid concurrent transmissions, combined with two different mechanisms to increase reliability, one based on time diversity and another on cognitive radio. The protocol and its mechanisms to enhance reliability are compared in different interference scenarios, and show that cognitive radios achieves better performance than time diversity, especially when the interference is produced by a jammer.