NIST, Intel Researchers Win Best Paper at IEEE’s Factory Communications Systems Conference

NIST and Intel researchers were awarded best paper at the 19^th IEEE International Conference on Factory Communications Systems (WFCS 2023), in April 2023. The paper is titled, “Scheduling for Time-Critical Applications Utilizing Transmission Control Protocol in Software-Based 802.1Qbv Wireless Time Sensitive Networking” and was authored by NIST’s Rick Candell, Karl Montgomery, and Mohamed Hany, and Intel’s Dave Cavalcanti and Susruth Sudhakaran.

The paper presents a methodology for using wireless time-sensitive networking (TSN) for industrial applications. Wireless systems are key to the next generation of operational systems in factories, warehouses, retail spaces, automated buildings, etc. Relative to wired systems, wireless networks are easier and cheaper to install and maintain, have a simpler infrastructure, and enable greater system mobility. Wireless TSN enables deterministic latency and higher reliability than previously achievable using traditional Wi-Fi channel access approaches. 

TSN was originally developed for Ethernet-based networks and applications utilizing the unreliable UDP transport protocol.  In the paper, the NIST-Intel team demonstrated a novel method for accommodating the reliable TCP protocol which is much more widely used in factory communications systems.  The results of this work are anticipated to be included in a future release of the Wi-Fi standard, IEEE 802.11.