Safety-related Applications over Wireless Time-Sensitive Networks
Jetmir Haxhibeqiri, Pablo Avila Campos, Ingrid Moerman, Jereoen Hoebeke
Abstract
Industrial communication systems provide deterministic and reliable communication between various industrial components. In the past several decades, different communication technologies (Fieldbus, Real-Time Ethernet (RTE)) were used to achieve such determinism. Recently, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is being utilized in industrial environments to support end-to-end low latency deterministic communication by providing mechanisms for accurate time synchronization, traffic scheduling/shaping, and reliability. With many use cases requiring portability and seamless mobility, such features are being developed for wireless networks as well, expanding the time-sensitive communication to the wireless domain. Wireless TSN’s aim is to provide wired TSN-like features, achieving wired-wireless interoperability and flattening the automation system pyramid. In this paper, we present an integration between the wireless TSN and PROFINET. We show that the safety-related applications can be supported seamlessly, providing deterministic communication and reliability under best-effort traffic load in the wireless network. The solution is evaluated in terms of the achieved end-to-end latency and the probability of failure per hour of the fail-safe communication. It is shown that by using wireless time-sensitive networking with dedicated time slots per traffic flow a safety integrity level up to grade 4 can be achieved.