Delay Management Using Packet Fragmentation in Wireless Industrial Automation Systems

Managing delay is one of the core requirements of industrial automation applications due to the high risk associated for equipment and human lives. Using efficient Media Access Control (MAC) schemes guarantees the timely transmission of critical data, particularly in the industrial environments where heterogeneous data is inherently expected. This paper compares the performance of Fragmentation based MAC (FROG-MAC) against Fuzzy Priority Scheduling based MAC (FPS-MAC), both of which have been designed to optimize the performance of heterogenous wireless networks. Contiki has been used as a simulation platform and a single hop star topology has been assumed to resemble the industrial environment. It has been shown that FROG-MAC has the potential to outperform FPS-MAC in terms of energy efficiency and delay both, due to its inherent feature of interrupting ongoing lower priority transmission on the channel.