Subdividing One Channel of 5GHz Wireless LAN into Narrow Channels for Factory IoT.

In recent days, wireless communications receive a lot of attention at factory sites. For stable operation of production systems using wireless communications, the best way is for each system is assigned an independent wireless channel. However, a mixed environment of different wireless systems on the same frequency makes it difficult to find out the cause of an incident. In this paper, we focus on uplink applications at factory sites, such as sensing. We propose subdividing one channel of 5GHz wireless LAN into narrow channels. We show the result to increase the number of accommodated terminals in the same bandwidth of normal wireless LAN, and improvement of frequency utilization with prototype devices. To be precise, the total throughput of our proposed method is 1.7times or more as compared with the current method when the number of sensor nodes sending data simultaneously is over 12.