CCA-Embedded TDMA enabling acyclic traffic in industrial wireless sensor networks

A growing trend in the automation industry is to use wireless technologies to reduce cable costs and deployment time, unlock stranded information in deployed devices and enable wireless control applications. The WirelessHART protocol is the first open and interoperable industrial wireless sensor network standard, which proposes a combination of time division multiple access (TDMA) and channel hopping as a medium access control (MAC) protocol. TDMA is a schedule-based protocol, which is suitable for predictable cyclic traffic. However, for burst acyclic traffic, TDMA degenerates into an inefficient slotted ALOHA. In this article, we propose a complementary mechanism to TDMA, CCA-Embedded TDMA, which can be applied to improve the transmission efficiency and system stability of TDMA-based systems such as the WirelessHART protocol. A Markov model is proposed to evaluate the efficiency of system throughput and expected delay of CCA-Embedded TDMA. Furthermore, we show by analytical and simulation results that our proposed CCA-Embedded TDMA scheme can increase the throughput by 100% and reduce the expected delay by 75% for a common scenario. We also implement CCA-Embedded TDMA into an embedded system as a part of the WirelessHART MAC protocol. The experimental results verify the efficiency of CCA-Embedded TDMA and its backward compatibility with the WirelessHART protocol.