Frame-Based Randomized Scheduling of Packets with Random-Deadlines for Multi-Flow Wireless Networks.

The use of wireless communications in industrial applications has motivated various advances in manufacturing automation by allowing more flexibility in installing wireless sensors and actuators than their wired counterparts. The main challenge in industrial wireless deployment is the strict timing and reliability requirements in these systems. Industrial wireless networks are commonly characterized by strict packet deadlines. As a result, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocols have been widely exploited in various technologies due to their ease of implementation and packet collision avoidance. Moreover, the use of frame-based protocols is motivated by the need for short processing times at the edge nodes of the network. In this work, we consider the problem of scheduling multiple data flows over a wireless network operating in an industrial environment. These flows are characterized by random strict deadlines for each packet following a given probability distribution. Each of these flows may represent the data coming from a sensor to the controller or the control commands from the controller to an actuator. A randomized frame-based scheduling scheme is analyzed where each time slot in the frame is assigned to a data flow randomly.