A Distributed Load Balancing Approach for Industrial IEEE 802.11 Wireless Networks

Advantages provided by the use of wireless technologies in industrial scenarios, like reduced costs of installation, better flexibility, the ability to easily realize temporary deployments (e.g. for monitoring purposes), etc. are discussed by researchers in literature. In these contexts, time-critical transmissions have to be supported by automation networks. In IEEE 802.11 standard protocol, one of most popular technologies for process control networks, Access Points (APs) are responsible for nodes connection. Timeliness of communications can be compromised by transmission of wireless nodes through overloaded APs. This paper shows a new dynamic Load Balancing approach that distributes network load in order to ensure, for each station, best possible performances in terms of soft real-time constraints, in an industrial process control scenario.