Scheduling Mechanisms in Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks for Multi-rate Periodic Control in Industry 4.0

This article investigates scheduling strategies for wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) in Industry 4.0 scenarios. In particular, we address the problem of real-time scheduling for multirate control systems by proposing a novel framework. Our framework features four strategies that improve reliability, schedulability, and execution time, and reduce communication and storage costs. Two-phase (2P) scheduling is our first strategy, devised to improve communication reliability. Our second strategy is the least-laxity-first with remaining conflicts (LLF-RC) scheduling algorithm, which has high schedulability and affordable execution time. LLF-RC also keeps the maximum queue length at a moderate level, making it suitable for storage-constrained devices. Our third and fourth strategies are opportunistic aggregation (OA) and repetitive scheduling (RS). OA performs simple and effective packet aggregation, enhancing schedulability by up to 97% and reducing execution time by up to 29%, in our simulation. RS has negligible execution time, and contributes to minimize communication and storage costs. It reduces the maximum execution time by 92% and the maximum communication and storage cost by 99%, in our simulation. We compare our proposed framework against existing approaches, and evaluate the advantages of our strategies in realistic scenarios.