Wi-Fi Rate Adaptation for Moving Equipment in Industrial Environments

TL;DR

This paper evaluates Wi-Fi rate adaptation algorithms, especially Minstrel, in industrial environments with moving equipment, focusing on latency and packet loss to inform future enhancements using digital twins.

Contribution

It provides a performance analysis of Minstrel in static and mobile industrial scenarios, highlighting challenges for reliable Wi-Fi communication in such settings.

Findings

Minstrel's performance varies significantly with mobility.

Latency and packet loss are critical metrics in industrial Wi-Fi.

Results inform future development of centralized, digital twin-based rate adaptation algorithms.

Abstract

Wi-Fi is currently considered one of the most promising solutions for interconnecting mobile equipment (e.g., autonomous mobile robots and active exoskeletons) in industrial environments. However, relability requirements imposed by the industrial context, such as ensuring bounded transmission latency, are a major challenge for over-the-air communication. One of the aspects of Wi-Fi technology that greatly affects the probability of a packet reaching its destination is the selection of the appropriate transmission rate. Rate adaptation algorithms are in charge of this operation, but their design and implementation are not regulated by the IEEE 802.11 standard. One of the most popular solutions, available as open source, is Minstrel, which is the default choice for the Linux Kernel. In this paper, Minstrel performance is evaluated for both static and mobility scenarios. Our analysis focuses on metrics of interest for industrial contexts, i.e., latency and packet loss ratio, and serves as a preliminary evaluation for the future development of enhanced rate adaptation algorithms based on centralized digital twins.