Duplication Avoidance Mechanisms to Reduce Bandwidth Usage in Redundant Wi-Fi Networks

Seamless redundancy is an effective way to increase communication quality over wireless channels, and provides a degree of reliability that meets the standards demanded by many distributed control applications in industrial plants. Unfortunately, wireless spectrum usage increases consequently, which is often unacceptable as this is a shared and limited resource. Wi-Red is a proposal that applies seamless redundancy to Wi-Fi. Unlike competing solutions, suitable mechanisms were purposely included, which help reducing bandwidth consumption by avoiding transmission on air of frame duplicates when not needed. In this paper, such mechanisms are analyzed and their ability to save wireless bandwidth evaluated. Results show that improvements are really tangible.