Increasing the reliability of IEEE 802.11ad for industrial applications

We consider two main aspects related to the application of the IEEE 802.11ad in the industrial environment: the guarantee of a low delivery delay and the reliability of the communication system. Firstly, we discuss the parameter settings of the IEEE802.11ad MAC aimed to guarantee a delivery delay of 1 ms. Then, we formulate a binary linear programming model to enhance the reliability of the system under the Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP), while minimizing the number of Access Points (APs) and taking into account the low delivery delay requisite. We propose a heuristic to efficiently solve the design problem, and present the results of a preliminary computational study. The reported results highlight the features of the obtained solutions and give insights on how the proposed heuristic can be used and improved.