Enabling Industrial Internet of Things With Wi-Fi 6: An Automated Factory Case Study

Industrial Internet of Things applications require low and deterministic delays, which is a challenging target for emerging wireless communication technologies. While the upcoming Wi-Fi 7 and Wi-Fi 8, tailored for real-time and reliable communications, are under development, this article focuses on Wi-Fi 6 and explores its capabilities to support industrial applications. This article summarizes key lessons learned during an industrial project on factory automation with Wi-Fi 6, describes and advocates a solution that satisfies quality of service requirements in industrial scenarios. To generalize the designed scheme, this article proposes a framework that maximizes the capacity of the system under reliability and latency constraints. Through extensive simulations, this article shows that the proposed scheme more than doubles the network capacity compared with the default Wi-Fi 6 implementation in terms of the number of stations served with low and deterministic packet delivery delays.