TTWiFi: time-triggered communication over WiFi

Lusty, Carl; Estivill-Castro, V. (Vladimir); Hexel, René

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3479243.3487298

TTWiFi: time-triggered communication over WiFi

License

Citation

Lusty C, Estivill-Castro V, Hexel R. TTWiFi: time-triggered communication over WiFi. In: DIVANet '21: Proceedings of the 11th ACM Symposium on Design and Analysis of Intelligent Vehicular Networks and Applications; 2021 Nov 22-26; Alicante, Spain. New York: Association for Computing Machinery; 2021. p. 35-44. DOI: 10.1145/3479243.3487298

Abstract

WiFi is prevalent in mobile robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT) despite the fact that many applications in these environments require real-time communication. WiFi does not guarantee timeliness and often introduces unbounded communication delays. We present TTWiFi, a time-triggered protocol for fault-tolerant real-time communication between devices situated in a broadcast domain, that only requires minor changes to IEEE 802.11 parameters and remains standards-compliant in critical aspects. We implemented TTWiFi on a representative platform and benchmarked our implementation with TCP and UDP over unmodified WiFi. Our results demonstrate that unlike the latter, TTWiFi has the ability to maintain communication in a congested environment while exhibiting fail-silent behaviour crucial for fault tolerance and real-time communication.