EchoRing: Meeting Hard Real-Time Constraints with Decentralized Wireless Networks

Given the rising demand for wireless solutions in the area of machine-to-machine communication, we present the novel EchoRing protocol. It is designed to serve the communication needs of industrial applications, while being optimized for the wireless channel specifically. Directly taking known principles of tethered communication to the wireless domain is likely to yield degraded performance results. Additional techniques have to be added to make known principles be able to master the challenges of wireless channel dynamics. On the other hand, the majority of currently existing wireless communication standards are developed to allow mobility on the last hop of a transmission path that originates in the Internet or a local home network. Hence, the focus is on supporting the best-effort paradigm of the data streams. However, in industrial environments this best-effort paradigm gets replaced by the need to steadily achieve very high reliabilities at very short deadlines. In this demonstration, we will show how industrial applications can be interconnected wirelessly despite the drawbacks of the wireless channel. The experimental setup allows to compare different medium access control protocols under varying conditions.