Priority Assignment for Real-Time Flows in WirelessHART Networks

WirelessHART is a new wireless sensor-actuator network standard specifically developed for process industries. A key challenge faced by WirelessHART networks is to meet the stringent real-time communication requirements imposed by process monitoring and control applications. Fixed-priority scheduling, a popular scheduling policy in real-time networks, has recently been shown to be an effective real-time transmission scheduling policy in WirelessHART networks. Priority assignment has a major impact on the schedulability of real-time flows in these networks. This paper investigates the open problem of priority assignment for periodic real-time flows for feedback control loops closed through a WirelessHART network. The authors first propose an optimal priority assignment algorithm based on local search for any given worst case delay analysis.