On the Performance of a PRP-WLAN Enabled Wireless Backbone

摘要

This paper investigated a 1-out-of-2 controller fault-tolerant system composed of two industrial workcells. Improving the performance and the reliability of the employed IEEE 802.11g wireless backbone was the main focus of this study. The approach taken to achieve this goal is the application of parallel redundant diverse wireless communication. A parallel redundant wireless backbone that interconnects two industrial workcells with a large number of sensors and actuators is modeled and simulated with the OPNET Network Modeler and its performance characteristics evaluated. For all studied system performance metrics, it was shown that the PRP-WLAN backbone is superior to a single-channel implementation under all investigated interference scenarios.