Fundamental Constraints For Time-Slotted Mac Design In Wireless High Performance: The Realistic Perspective Of Timing

Industrial applications pose the most stringent requirements to the underlying communication networks. Wireless industrial communication is gaining popularity due to its cost-effectiveness, flexibility and capability of functioning in harsh environments. However, to replace the wired counterpart in the most critical applications performing real-time control and monitoring, the according requirements in terms of latency, reliability and determinism must be met, the latency among which is found to be the bottleneck. To improve the latency performance of wireless communication, modification or new techniques should be developed. Moreover, medium access control (MAC) design should be based on valid timing parameters, as to achieve ultra-low latency, the timing parameters are pushed to the limits. In this paper, we consider to provide fundamental timing constraints as valid inputs for MAC design for wireless high performance network. We start from determining the fundamental constraints as well as the affecting factor in the timing perspective, and then we review and analyze some state-of-art wireless implementations in terms of the timing indexes. Based on the investigation and analysis, realistic timing constraints of different algorithms, hardware, mechanisms are presented, and three main directions for MAC design in wireless high performance network are outlined.