IEEE Access Special Section: Advances on High Performance Wireless Networks for Automation and IIoT

Technologies for making devices communicate seamlessly over the air are expected to be adopted more and more in future digital ecosystems, including cyber-physical systems. In the latter case, machine-to-machine (M2M) interactions are often characterized by tight timing constraints. When communication takes place on shared and noisy media, timeliness is customarily specified as the probability that a message is delivered within specific deadlines, which depend on the dynamics of the controlled system. A fair amount of effort was spent in the past two decades to improve wireless communication technologies, and there is now the expectation that in the future, they could be (almost) as dependable as wires.