An Experimental Evaluation of WIA-FA and IEEE 802.11 Networks for Discrete Manufacturing

WIA-FA and IEEE 802.11 are two most widely adopted industrial wireless standards in discrete manufacturing. However, comprehensive performance comparisons between WIA-FA and IEEE 802.11 are still missing and industrial applications urgently need experimental methods to guide the selection of appropriate wireless technologies. To this end, this paper performs extensive experiments between WIA-FA and IEEE 802.11 in two practical industrial scenarios, with one ordered scenario defining the transmission order of devices and the other order-free scenario imposing no order constraints to the transmission order of devices. Network performance indices of the WIA-FA and IEEE 802.11 networks, including reliability, delay, delay jitter, and disorder rate are compared for different network sizes and data generation periods. Experimental results show that the WIA-FA protocol provides stable network performance, while the network performance of the IEEE 802.11 protocol is random. Additionally, we perform preliminary comparisons of WIA-FA with IEEE 802.11ax and 5G New Radio.</p