HOW TO EXPLOIT SPATIAL DIVERSITY IN WIRELESS INDUSTRIAL NETWORKS

A key challenge for wireless industrial networking is to successfully transmit a packet within a prescribed deadline despite the unfriendly properties of the wireless transmission medium. A very promising class of approaches exploits the concept of spatial diversity to improve the robustness of wireless transmission. The concept of relaying belongs to this class and in this paper we discuss how protocols for wireless industrial networks can be designed to include relaying approaches. An example protocol design is presented and the achievable probability for not missing a prescribed deadline is assessed in an example scenario, demonstrating the significant improvements possible with spatial diversity techniques.