Real-Time Mesh Networks for Industrial Applications

Wireless LANs (IEEE 802.11) are increasingly used in industrial applications. They reduce cabling costs, increase flexibility and enable mobile applications for maintenance or logistics tasks. Mesh networks provide a self-configuring and -healing wireless backbone for large scale deployments (e.g. in process automation). This paper presents a routing algorithm which provides QoS in wireless mesh networks, thus leveraging their use in industrial applications. It allows reserving bandwidth for real-time flows based on measurements of the physically available bandwidth. Thus it fully utilizes the bandwidth while still preventing congestion. Simulation results demonstrate the reliability of the algorithm and its advantage over previous works.