Predictable Latency-Aware Traffic Allocation for Seamless Wi-Fi Roaming in TSN Industrial IoT

Résumé fourni par la source

With the increasing adoption of embodied intelligence and autonomous mobile systems in industrial environments, automated guided vehicles (AGVs) impose stringent requirements on latency performance and communication reliability in time-sensitive networking (TSN)-related scenarios. However, under continuous mobility and frequent handovers, conventional single-link roaming mechanisms and latency-agnostic multi-link transmission schemes do not explicitly provide mechanisms to jointly support low latency, low jitter, and reliable connectivity. This limitation stems not only from the lack of effective models for deriving achievable medium access delay under heterogeneous access point (AP) load and contention conditions, but also from the absence of joint AP selection and traffic allocation mechanisms driven by such predictions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes Latency-Aware Traffic Allocation (LATA), a latency-aware multi-link seamless roaming and traffic allocation framework designed to operate within existing IEEE 802.11 mechanisms, without introducing protocol modifications or requiring specialized hardware extensions. For mixed nonsaturated and near-saturated network conditions, a Medium Access Control (MAC)-layer delay analysis model is developed to estimate the MAC-layer service delay—defined as the sum ofMAC queueing delay andMAC access delay—for an individual station associated with a given AP, leveraging observable channel utilization statistics and locally available transmission history. Based on the predicted delay, an adaptive AP selection and traffic allocation strategy is further developed, allowing dynamic switching among single-link transmission, load balancing, and packet-level redundancy during roaming. Simulation results based on ns-3 demonstrate that, under the evaluated scenarios, LATA reduces MAC-layer service delay compared with conventional single-link schemes and fixed-redundancy multi-link solutions while maintaining communication reliability, indicating its potential applicability in TSN-oriented scenarios where the MAC-layer service delay behavior influences end-to-end performance.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.