Implementation of an advanced IEEE 802.11 WLAN AP for real-time wireless communications

Wireless technologies are increasingly deployed in factory automation systems. They enable completely new application scenarios. Especially, IEEE 802.11 systems are of a high interest, due to their similarities to existing real-time Ethernet networks. However, existing implementations are only offering prioritization of frames and are lacking to meet certain real-time constraints when additional best-effort traffic is present. Therefore, an implementation of an isochronous medium access control is presented in this paper which is able to provide real-time guarantees based on time division multiple access. The hardware and software architecture is introduced and a first preliminary evaluation of the implementation shows its performance in terms of temporal behaviour.