Optimized IEEE 802.11ax for smart warehouses

Industry 4.0 aspires to digitize factories processes wholly. Wireless technologies represent one of the elements of this goal. However, the current standards and proprietary solutions need to meet the industry’s tight requirements for various use cases, such as smart warehouses, where robots manage and control entire tasks. One of the key research challenges toward replacing wired fieldbuses with wireless links is the design of wireless systems that address short packet transmissions and multi-user environments. Nevertheless, this challenge is partially obstructed by the limits of the current proposals and the industrial channel models. The authors detect as a potential solution the optimization of IEEE 802.11ax that, due to the use of OFDMA, could offer a high-performant system for smart warehouses. This article proposes an ad-hoc wireless system based on IEEE 802.11ax for smart warehouses that comprises optimization for MAC and PHY layers. Furthermore, two retransmission schemes based on frequency domain are described. This article proposes a methodology to evaluate the latency and reliability performance. Compared to previous proposals, the system shows improved performance.