End-to-End Delay Analysis for Fixed Priority Scheduling in WirelessHART Networks

The WirelessHART standard has been specifically designed for real-time communication between sensor and actuator devices for industrial process monitoring and control. End-to-end communication delay analysis for WirelessHART networks is required for acceptance test of real-time data flows from sensors to actuators and for workload adjustment in response to network dynamics. In this paper, we map the scheduling of real-time periodic data flows in a WirelessHART network to real-time multiprocessor scheduling. We, then, exploit the response time analysis for multiprocessor scheduling and propose a novel method for the end-to-end delay analysis of the real-time flows that are scheduled using a fixed priority scheduling policy in a WirelessHART network. Simulations based on both random topologies and real network topologies of a physical testbed demonstrate the efficacy of our end-to-end delay analysis in terms of acceptance ratio under various fixed priority scheduling policies.