Wireless Mesh Routing For Indoor Robotic Communications

摘要

With increase adaptation of Industry 4.0, large warehouses deploy huge number of robots and sensors along with humans to manage inventory. Such a collaborative environment requires a seamless wireless communication infrastructure to share information among different entities. Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) have evolved as the next generation network for improving wireless services by providing inherent multi-hop communication. WMN deploys a routing protocol at layer-2 and provides multi-hop communication functionality with reduced overhead. Although various routing protocols are proposed for WMN, they are not very effective when WMN are applied as underlying technology in a multi-robotic wireless network. This is because of the fact that unlike any other wireless mobile device, robotic devices have certain task work-flow to follow and hence their mobility and connectivity with adjacent robots depends on their tasks at hand. In this paper we propose a new path selection and multi-hop routing protocol called Robotic Wireless Mesh Protocol (RWMP) for indoor multi-robot wireless networks. Through our NS3 based simulations we compare performances of the proposed model with existing state-of-the-art models and show that the proposed model outperforms existing state-of-the-art schemes in terms of average throughput and end-to-end delay.