NIST Researchers Give Presentation on High-reliability Industrial Wireless Communications at IECON 2024

At the 50^th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2024), Dr. Richard (Rick) Candell presented a collaborative effort between NIST and Intel, showcasing key advancements in industrial communications. The presentation highlighted how the application of IEEE 802.1CB (frame replication and elimination for reliability) in a wireless IEC 62439 High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) architecture significantly enhanced on-time deadline compliance in industrial automation systems. In this work, Montgomery et al. emphasized that this approach may greatly improve the reliability of industrial communications through seamless redundancy. The wireless team demonstrated the performance of IEEE 802.1CB when operating across 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency bands by injecting the wireless channel with stressful interference loads. They found that the wireless IEEE 802.1CB implementation performed well as expected, in that it greatly reduced latency when a single frequency band was subject to interference loads. However, when both bands were stressed, latency increased. Carrier-sense multiple access was the driving mechanism in Wi-Fi that caused the latency spikes, as devices sensed for the channel to be clear before transmitting. By implementing other time-sensitive networking standards, such as 802.11Qbv (scheduled traffic), integrators may eliminate randomness by protecting critical traffic. Stakeholders from both industry and academia believe that utilizing these redundant frequency bands will enable emerging industrial applications, where maintaining reliable wireless links is paramount.