Collaborative Coexistence Management Scheme for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

The future manufacturing environment is foreseen to be increasingly diverse with multi-vendor industrial wireless devices deployed in the same geographical area. Thus, effective medium resource sharing mechanisms are urgently needed to enable the coexistence of those heterogeneous industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs). To accommodate such heterogeneity, this paper proposes a collaborative scheduling algorithm (CSA) for coordinating the activation of each coexisting IWSN while guaranteeing their respective real-time communication requirements. Specifically, the proposed CSA is able to help determine a unique data transmission instantance for each network node that periodically generates time-sensitive data, through which timely data delivery is guaranteed without the interference of each other.