REWIMO: A Real-Time and Reliable Low-Power Wireless Mobile Network

Industrial applications and cyber-physical systems rely on real-time wireless networks to deliver data in a timely and reliable manner. However, existing solutions provide these guarantees only for stationary nodes. In this article, we present REWIMO, a solution for real-time and reliable communications in mobile networks. REWIMO has a two-tier architecture composed of (i) infrastructure nodes and (ii) mobile nodes that associate with infrastructure nodes as they move. REWIMO employs an on-join bandwidth reservation approach and benefits from a set of techniques to efficiently reserve bandwidth for each mobile node at the time of its admission and over its potential data forwarding paths. To ensure association of mobile nodes with infrastructure nodes over high-quality links, REWIMO uses the two-phase scheduling technique to coordinate neighbor discovery with data transmission. To mitigate the overhead of handling network dynamics, REWIMO employs an additive scheduling algorithm, which is capable of additive bandwidth reservation without modifying existing schedules. Compared to the algorithms used by static real-time wireless networks, the techniques and the algorithms employed by REWIMO result in a significant increase in real-time capacity, enhanced reliability, and considerably faster handling of network dynamics.