An Experimental Evaluation on Using TDMA over 802.11 MAC for Wireless Networked Control Systems

The recent interest for Wireless Networked Control Systems has boosted new research activities on real-time 802.11-based communications. In fact, due to their versatility, wireless LANs can be exploited as infrastructure in this kind of control systems, but changes to channel access techniques are required. To this aim, we propose a novel experimental implementation of a TDMA scheme over 802.11 MAC, based on the hard real-time networking-framework RTnet and on the Xenomai real-time task scheduler Preliminary results have shown that, using the proposed approach, transmission delays smaller than 10 ms and packet loss rates smaller than 0.5% can be achieved.