Multipath aware Scheduling for High Reliability and Fault Tolerance in Low Power Industrial Networks

<p>The Industrial Internet of Things is expected to enable the Industry 4.0 through the large deployment of low-<br> power devices. However, industrial applications require most of the time high reliability close to 100%, and<br> low end-to-end delays. Thus, most industrial wireless networks rely on a strict schedule of the transmissions<br> to avoid collisions, and implement frequency hopping to combat external interference. In multihop topologies,<br> the network has to decide both when the transmissions have to be scheduled, and which router can forward<br> the packets. To be fault-tolerant, multipath routing consists in exploiting several paths in parallel. We<br> exploit here a braided path routing structure, where each router has several possible next hops. Thus, we<br> can cope with any fault along the path, while still providing a remaining operational path. We propose<br> also a scheduling algorithm, where multiple transmitters are attached to a single cell, to the same receiver.<br> The schedule is constructed such that only one transmitter is active at a time, and is consequently collision-<br> free. Mutualizing the same cell for several transmitters reduces the energy consumption and increases the<br> network capacity.</p>