We are pleased to have Dr. Mina Rady (INSA Lyon) give the following talk
- Wednesday 12-Jul-2023, 11-12
- Inria Paris, A115
Title: Characterizing the Performance of Wi-Fi for Industrial Robotics
Abstract: Wi-Fi is a standard off-the-shelf solution for industrial robotics. The IEEE 802.11ax amendment extends it to support the 6 GHz band, 160 MHz and bit-rates up to 9.6 Gbps. We evaluate the performance of Wi-Fi using 9 different physical layer (PHY) configurations in an industrial shipyard in the presence of high radio frequency interference and metallic obstructions. We deploy an experimental setup of a robotic station (STA) and a controller STA with three applications running in parallel: a robotic STA sends a high throughput stream to a controller, a Robotic Operating System application is sending time-critical control commands to the robotic STA, Precision Time Protocol (PTP) keeps synchronizing the clocks between both STAs. We characterize the network performance in terms of three Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): streaming throughput, IP-level delay using PTP, and Application-level delay of ROS control packets. The networks are run in: short range LoS, medium range LoS, long range NLoS, and long range with metallic obstructions settings. We observe trade-offs as there is no one PHY that is best for all scenarios and KPIs. Wide channel PHYs (e.g. 160 MHz) perform best for throughput reaching up to 900 Mbps while PHYs while 80 MHz or 20 MHz bandwidth achieve as low as 9 ms delay. This motivates further research in multi-PHY adaptation for industrial robotics.
