On the Suitability of Wi-Fi for Interconnecting Moving Equipment in Industrial Environments

2025-06-06

AI Summary

Industrial wireless real-time control of mobile devices (e.g., autonomous mobile robots, wearables) in Industry 4.0/5.0 faces dual constraints of ultra-low latency and battery energy efficiency. This paper presents the first joint quantitative evaluation of latency determinism and energy efficiency of Wi-Fi under dynamic industrial channel conditions. Leveraging a high-fidelity NS-3 simulation framework, we integrate IEEE 802.11ac/ax protocol stacks, realistic mobility models, industrial interference spectra, and dynamic transmit power control. We systematically analyze end-to-end latency distributions and energy–latency trade-offs across varying mobile speeds, node densities, and traffic loads. Our results expose the practical performance boundaries of Wi-Fi in representative industrial scenarios. The study provides empirically grounded, quantifiable insights for industrial wireless technology selection—addressing a critical gap in existing literature regarding joint spatiotemporal constraint evaluation.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Internet of Things, Sensor Networks & Smart Cities
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

To ensure an unprecedented degree of flexibility, next-generation Industry 4.0/5.0 production plants increasingly rely on mobile devices, e.g., autonomous mobile robots and wearables. In these cases, a major requirement is getting rid of cables through the adoption of wireless networks. To this purpose, Wi-Fi is currently deemed one of the most promising solutions. Achieving reliable communications over the air for distributed real-time control applications is, however, not devoid of troubles. In fact, bounded transmission latency must be ensured for most of the exchanged packets. Moreover, for devices powered on batteries, energy consumption also needs to be taken into account. In this paper, a joint simulated analysis of these aspects is carried out to quantitatively evaluate what we can practically expect from Wi-Fi technology.

Problem

• Evaluating Wi-Fi reliability for industrial mobile equipment
• Assessing Wi-Fi latency for real-time control applications
• Analyzing Wi-Fi energy consumption for battery-powered devices

Innovation

• Wi-Fi for industrial mobile equipment
• Joint latency-energy consumption analysis
• Simulated evaluation of Wi-Fi performance