Improving Effectiveness of Seamless Redundancy in Real Industrial Wi-Fi Networks

Abstract: Reliability and determinism of Wi-Fi can be tangibly improved by means of seamless redundancy, to the point of making this technology suitable for industrial environments. As pointed out in papers, the most benefits can be achieved when no phenomena can simultaneously affect transmissions on all channels of a redundant link. In this paper, several aspects are analyzed which, if not properly counteracted, may worsen seamless redundancy effectiveness. Effects they cause on communication have been experimentally evaluated in real testbeds, which rely on commercial Wi-Fi devices. Then, practical guidelines are provided, which aim at preventing joint interference through a careful system design. Results show that measured communication quality can be made as good as expected in theory.