On Industrial MAC Protocols: State of the Art Systems and Recent Approaches

Abstract Today’s industrial production facilities are already equipped with a high amount of systems belonging to the field of industrial information technology and industrial communication. Wireless industrial communication systems are increasingly gaining importance because they offer financial and technological advantages. Because of their applications, industrial communication systems can be interpreted as a precursor for future communication systems which are expected to experience a paradigm shift since machine type communication is gaining growing importance. Therefore, future wireless communication systems are expected to support multi-service operation, i. e. especially multi-rate as well as multi-level quality of service (QoS) requirements. MAC protocols utilized in a wireless industrial communication system will therefore have to enable different user types and their different requirements regarding the quality of service requirements, data rate requirements, latency constraints, different duty cycles et cetera efficiently. In this paper, we compare several state-of-the-art wireless systems and promising approaches in the literature and evaluate their fitness for these future scenarios.