In Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs), monitoring data generated by field devices are supposed to be delivered to the gateway with high reliability and low latency. However, most of the existing industrial wireless standards are based on IEEE 802.15.4 and offer limited data rates, which prevents their adoption in critical industrial applications. Based on IEEE 802.11, a recent international standard WIA-FA is proposed to address higher communication requirements in factory automation. In this paper, we study the timeslot allocation for retransmissions in the WIA-FA network. Specifically, we first design a novel superframe to support the Negative ACKnowledgment (NACK)-based retransmission mode in the WIA-FA network, and build a network model which considers the uplink and downlink packet losses simultaneously. Then, we analyze the three major drawbacks of the default NACK-based retransmission scheme in WIA-FA and propose an Automatic On-Demand Retransmission (AODR) scheme. Finally, we give a detailed reliability analysis of the proposed AODR scheme, and prove the relationship between the transmission reliability and critical factors (e.g., the channel condition and the length of the superframe) in the WIA-FA network. Simulation results show that the proposed AODR scheme outperforms existing works in terms of transmission reliability and timeliness for different channel conditions.

This work is published on IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 70.6(2021):6094-6107.