A MAC protocol and a scheduling approach as elements of a lower layers architecture in wireless industrial LANs

This work-in-progress paper describes some elements of our efforts in defining an architecture and an appropriate set of protocols for industrial local area networks (ILAN) with wireless communication media. The major focus is on lower layer protocols. The main elements are a description of data link layer services, a MAC protocol and a scheduling approach taking into consideration special properties of wireless media. The proposed MAC protocol is a variant of TDMA attacking its known problems. The goal of the link stale dependent scheduling approach is to increase transmission efficiency over wireless links.