AdaptiveHART: An Adaptive Real-Time MAC Protocol for Industrial Internet-of-Things

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSAN) for real-time reliable communications are being embraced in the Industrial Internet of Things. One key property required for WSAN is adaptability with respect to dynamic environments. Most existing studies assume that a network manager computes global schedules and disseminates schedule information to every node whenever the network parameters need to be updated. Such a centralized approach may degrade control performance due to nonreal-time response to dynamic environments. In this article, we introduce a novel time division multiple access MAC protocol, AdaptiveHART, which updates the network parameters in real-time without the dissemination intervals. AdaptiveHART achieves a reduction in adaptation latency up to 74%, maximum schedulable ratio, and control performance up to 75% than the conventional WirelessHART. We assess our protocol using a stochastic response time analysis, which provides an accurate end-to-end delay distribution and a schedulability condition that can guarantee real-time performance in WSAN.