Our paper entitled Multipath aware scheduling for high reliability and fault tolerance in low power industrial networks has been accepted in the Journal of Network and Computer Applications.
Most industrial wireless networks rely on a strict schedule of the transmissions to avoid collisions, and implement frequency hopping to combat external interference. In multihop topologies, the network has to decide both when the transmissions have to be scheduled, and which router can forward the packets. To be fault-tolerant, multipath routing consists in exploiting several paths in parallel.
We exploit here a braided path routing structure, where each router has several possible next hops. Thus, we can cope with any fault along the path, while still providing a remaining operational path. We propose also a scheduling algorithm, where multiple transmitters are attached to a single cell, to the same receiver. The schedule is constructed such that only one transmitter is active at a time, and is consequently collision-free. Mutualizing the same cell for several transmitters reduces the energy consumption and increases the network capacity.
Our braided path approach is particularly efficient to provide high reliability even when some devices crash.
This paper is the result of a joint collaboration with Prof. Mohammad Nassiri (Bu-Ali Sina University, Iran) and his master student Erfan Mozaffari Ahrar