Ultra Reliable Wireless
To achieve ultra reliable wireless network, this project first aims to address radio redesign including cross-layer optimizations for routing and channel access with frequency hopping, and then focuses on developing cooperation algorithms for mitigating interference and exploiting path diversities.
Background & Objective: Wireless networks are currently being used for remote sensing and industrial plant monitoring. However, for wireless to be adopted in industrial automation, requirements for ultra-reliability and end-to-end latency in the order of several milliseconds should be met. ZigBee and emerging ISA SP100.11a standards are away from provisioning these stringent QoS levels. Clearly, there will be a need to improve performance levels of wireless communication technologies within the next several years.
Delay and reliability requirements of industrial process monitoring applications are achievable with state-of-the-art wireless technologies such as wireless HART, SP100.11a and ZigBee-pro. Although, customers already desire to switch to wireless industrial automation platforms, wireless solutions are not mature yet to be adopted into industrial automation and milliseconds level delay critical applications. On the other hand, the emerging ISA SP100.11a standard provides a major milestone in this direction. It is not very far from today that we will start seeing wireless factories. Our objective is to conduct research on ultra-reliable and low-latency wireless networks. The scope includes development of cross-layer design techniques and improvements to existing standard based wireless solutions.
Technical Discussion: In order to improve communication reliability and lower latency to required levels, certain issues need to be addressed at PHY, MAC and networking layers. Adaptive modulation and channel coding together with frequency hopping provide robustness. Furthermore, interference aware channel access, QoS based prioritization of message transmissions and deploying hybrid ARQ schemes improve both MAC efficiency and reliability. Developing reservation based dynamic route discovery and maintenance protocols and exploiting machine learning algorithms in making network routing more intelligent and adaptive to changes will also contribute to overall network performance.
Future Direction: We will be developing cooperative communication and cross-layer optimization techniques to improve reliability of wireless communications and to minimize end-to-end latency to the levels of several milliseconds.
Contacts:
Zafer Sahinoglu
Ghulam Bhatti
Jinyun Zhang
Technology Area: Digital Communications
Modification Date: August 1, 2007
