The concept of Industry 4.0 introduces the unification of industrial Internet-of-Things (IoT), cyber physical systems, and data-driven business modeling to improve production efficiency of the factories. To ensure high production efficiency, Industry 4.0 requires industrial IoT to be adaptable, scalable, real-time, and reliable. Recent successful industrial wireless standards such as WirelessHART appeared as a feasible approach for such industrial IoT. For reliable and real-time communication in highly unreliable environments, they adopt a high degree of redundancy. While a high degree of redundancy is crucial to real-time control, it causes a huge waste of energy, bandwidth, and time under a centralized approach and are therefore less suitable for scalability and handling network dynamics. To address these challenges, we propose DistributedHART—a distributed real-time scheduling system for WirelessHART networks. The essence of our approach is to adopt local (node-level) scheduling through a time window allocation among the nodes that allows each node to schedule its transmissions using a real-time scheduling policy locally and online. DistributedHART obviates the need of creating and disseminating a central global schedule in our approach, thereby significantly reducing resource usage and enhancing the scalability. To our knowledge, it is the first distributed real-time multi-channel scheduler for WirelessHART. We have implemented DistributedHART and experimented on a 130-node testbed. Our testbed experiments as well as simulations show at least 85% less energy consumption in DistributedHART compared to existing centralized approach while ensuring similar schedulability.

中文翻译：

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工业无线网络的分布式实时调度系统

工业 4.0 的概念引入了工业物联网 (IoT)、网络物理系统和数据驱动的业务建模的统一，以提高工厂的生产效率。为确保高生产效率，工业 4.0 要求工业物联网具有适应性、可扩展性、实时性和可靠性。最近成功的工业无线标准（如 WirelessHART）似乎是此类工业物联网的可行方法。为了在高度不可靠的环境中进行可靠和实时的通信，它们采用了高度冗余。虽然高度冗余对于实时控制至关重要，但在集中式方法下会造成能源、带宽和时间的巨大浪费，因此不太适合可扩展性和处理网络动态。为了应对这些挑战，我们提出了 DistributedHART——一种用于 WirelessHART 网络的分布式实时调度系统。我们方法的本质是通过节点之间的时间窗口分配采用本地（节点级）调度，允许每个节点使用本地和在线的实时调度策略来调度其传输。DistributedHART 消除了在我们的方法中创建和传播中央全局调度的需要，从而显着减少了资源使用并增强了可扩展性。据我们所知，它是第一个用于 WirelessHART 的分布式实时多通道调度程序。我们已经实现了 DistributedHART 并在 130 个节点的测试平台上进行了实验。