A Dual-Radio Hybrid Mesh Topology for Multi-Hop Industrial IoT Networks in Harsh Environments

Abstract

Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is a paradigm that changes the way people interact with infrastructures by enabling ubiquitous connection to the Internet. It allows to design connected infrastructures in industrial environments, e.g., factories, in order to support innovative services and improve efficiency. While the advantages of IIoT are numerous, it has some fundamental issues such as propagation of signal through metallic obstacles, i.e., walls in industrial environments. To address this issue, we propose a hybrid wired-wireless mesh node and network topology called hybrid mesh network (HMN), enabling the signal to cross over the metallic obstacles in harsh environments. The proposed hybrid mesh node utilizes dualradio feature of IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to improve the performance of the proposed HMN further considering multihop communications. The effects of the packet size and different fading channels on the performance of the proposed HMN are investigated through various simulations. In addition, the performance of the proposed HMN is compared with that of conventional wireless mesh network (WMN). The results reveal that the proposed HMN outperforms conventional WMN and the proposed topology is promising for the implementation of high performance wireless mesh networks in harsh environments.