Low Reliable and Low Latency Communications for Mission Critical Distributed Industrial Internet of Things

Achieving ubiquitous ultra-reliable low latency consensus in centralized wireless communication systems can be costly and hard to scale up. The consensus mechanism, which has been widely utilized in distributed systems, can provide fault tolerance to the critical consensus, even though the individual communication link reliability is relatively low. In this article, a widely used consensus mechanism, Raft, is introduced to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to achieve ultra-reliable and low latency consensus, where the consensus reliability performance in terms of nodes number and link transmission reliability is investigated. We propose a new concept, Reliability Gain, to show the linear relationship between consensus reliability and communication link transmission reliability. We also find that the time latency of consensus is contradictory to consensus reliability. These conclusions can provide guides to deploy Raft protocol in distributed IIoT systems.