A Smart Retransmission Mechanism for Ultra-Reliable Applications in Industrial Wireless Networks

Emerging mission-critical industrial applications pose serious challenges to the reliability of the industrial networks currently. Heterogeneous wireless terminals access the network through various industrial gateways, but the vulnerability of edge links hinders the safe operation on the site. Existing service protection methods of wireless links satisfy reliability requirements through naive redundancy mechanisms. However, these methods are difficult to ensure the long-term safety of industrial applications and consume excessive energy. Therefore, this article proposed an on-demand service protection (OSP) mechanism, which can retransmit data on time to meet reliability demands intelligently. First, a long-term reliability model and an energy consumption optimization problem are formulated. Second, we introduced a flexible module inside the industrial gateway to identify various requirements and detect crucial data loss events. Then, an intelligent agent is designed to avoid unexpected data loss, which can generate a retransmission policy according to application requirements. Finally, multiple validations on the OSP were conducted. Both numerical results and prototype experiments illustrate that the proposed solution outperforms existing candidates in terms of reliability and energy consumption.