A Fault-Tolerant Transmission Scheme in SDN-Based Industrial IoT (IIoT) over Fiber-Wireless Networks

Driven by the emerging mission-critical and data-intensive applications in industrial intelligent manufacturing, the software-defined network (SDN) based fiber-wireless access network (FiWi) is attracting considerable attention thanks to its capability of central control and large bandwidth. However, the heterogeneity of the network leads to new challenges, since the packet loss can be caused either by the poor channel quality of wireless links or network component failures. A novel and adaptive mechanism combining sparse random linear network coding with parallel transmission (SNC-PT) is proposed to achieve the fault-tolerance against high packet loss rate and any network element malfunction. We illustrate the benefits of using the SNC-PT mechanism to improve fault tolerance by characterizing the network performance with respect to the completion time and goodput along with its relationship to channel quality and node failures. We show that significant performance gains can be obtained in comparison with conventional uncoded transmission based on transmission control protocol (TCP). The simulation results show that the SNC-PT mechanism is fault-tolerant, while it can significantly shorten the data transmission completion time to at least 12% of the baseline and increase the goodput by about 10% compared to other coding schemes such as random linear network coding.