Transmission Scheduling With Order Constraints in WIA-FA-Based AGV Systems

Conventional wireless automated guided vehicle (AGV) systems based on WiFi or ZigBee suffer random network performance and fail to guarantee the ordered and reliable transmission in AGV applications. In this article, we study the transmission scheduling with order constraints in WIA-FA-based AGV systems. We first present the transmission process of data packets in the WIA-FA-based AGV system, and design a novel superframe structure to support the ordered data exchange in the AGV system. Then, we design three heuristic rules for timeslot allocation to regulate the device transmissions subject to order constraints. Finally, inspired by the designed rules, we propose a dynamic expected packet loss rate-based timeslot allocation (DELTA) algorithm and prove its time complexity rigorously. The simulation results show that the proposed DELTA algorithm outperforms the existing works in terms of transmission reliability for different channel conditions and network scales.