A Novel QoS-Aware Multi-Connectivity Scheme for Wireless IIoT

Abstract

Wireless technology is envisioned to be a major enabler of flexible industrial deployments, allowing agile installations and mobility of production elements. However, for industrial IoT (IIoT) usecases, reliability and service availability remain as key concerns for wide adoption. To enhance wireless link reliability, we propose in this paper a Selective Duplication with QoS (SDQoS) technique, a cross-layer scheduling solution which leverages radio access technology metrics and transport layer metrics to schedule data transmission across one or more links. The framework is implemented as part of a multi-access gateway solution and its capability is demonstrated in a realistic two-hall industrial production environment for a multi-data flow autonomous mobile robot use-case, using Wi-Fi. The proposed QoS-aware solution shows a major improvement in preserving low latency and reliability for critical control data in the presence of large background traffic as compared to state-of-the-art solutions.

An Empirical Study of 5G, Wi-Fi 6, and Multi-Connectivity Scalability in an Indoor Industrial Scenario

“…Multi-connectivity is often adopted for improving communication aspects such as latency, reliability and throughput. In the literature, different multi-connectivity schemes have been tested in industrial scenarios [8], [18]- [20]. In [18], the authors studied multi-connectivity for Ultra-Reliable and Low Latency Communications (URLLC) and the cost in throughput for other services such as Enhanced Mobile BroadBand (eMBB) services.…”

“…This work focused on the latency performance for the mobility case when using the PD and best path switching solutions in an indoor factory. On the other hand, the authors of [20] presented a novel multi-connectivity solution that takes into account the QoS to dynamically select the links for PD. This scheme was evaluated with Wi-Fi 6 in terms of latency and throughput.…”