Fountain Codes for Reliable and Deterministic Packet Transmission in Industrial Cloud Control Systems

With the thriving of digitalization in industry and the rapid development of cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT), it has become a growing trend to integrate industrial control with the cloud platform to form industrial cloud control systems (ICCSs). However, ICCSs bring great challenges to legacy communication networks, especially, wireless networks, on reliability and determinacy. This article utilizes fountain code as application-layer coding to provide high-reliability low-latency deterministic communication for ICCSs. According to the simulation results, fountain code scheme, especially, RaptorQ code significantly improves communication reliability. The performance difference of fountain codes between time-critical use cases and nontime-critical use cases provides another perspective to analyze and evaluate fountain codes. Then, we propose a self-adaptive coding parameter selection method based on different industrial use cases, to better meet the communication requirements and reduce the coding cost.