Probabilistic scheduling and Adaptive Relaying for WirelessHART networks

This paper deals with a way to probabilistically guarantee reliable packet delivery in WirelessHART based networks suitable for industrial control systems. We propose a new scheduling scheme, called Iterative Probabilistic Scheduling with Adaptive Relaying (IPS-AR), which consists of a static part (IPS) and a dynamic part (AR). IPS takes into account the channel characteristics and exploits relaying to achieve a minimum reliability threshold as requested by the supported industrial application. In the AR part, each relay node decides the packet to be sent based on online assessment of both the number of consecutive errors experienced by previous packets belonging to the same flow, as well as the number of copies of the packet currently available at the other relay nodes. This enables IPS-AR to achieve the desired reliability level while using the available re-sources in terms of time and bandwidth more efficiently.