Communications Survival Strategies for Industrial Wireless Control

Industrial wireless control systems are mainly designed on the premise of time-sensitive ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). With the introduction of survival time to the quality of service requirements of such systems, the design paradigm has evolved from typical link reliability (i.e., minimizing packet error rate), to service availability, that is, minimizing the chance of burst errors, which can cause loss of communication for longer than survival time. In this article, we address the implications of this evolution and present a set of survival time strategies that are designed to guarantee end-to-end dependable industrial wireless control. To ensure service availability, transmissions are divided into normal and survival modes. The presented strategies include scheduling and link adaptation that are designed to target the differences between these modes of operation, traffic prioritization to enhance service availability for users in survival mode, and more efficient multi-node, multi-path, and multi-carrier communications techniques.