A New Method of Priority Assignment for Real-Time Flows in the WirelessHART Network by the TDMA Protocol

WirelessHART is a wireless sensor network that is widely used in real-time demand analyses. A key challenge faced by WirelessHART is to ensure the character of real-time data transmission in the network. Identifying a priority assignment strategy that reduces the delay in flow transmission is crucial in ensuring real-time network performance and the schedulability of real-time network flows. We study the priority assignment of real-time flows in WirelessHART on the basis of the multi-channel time division multiple access (TDMA) protocol to reduce the delay and improve the ratio of scheduled. We provide three kinds of methods: (1) worst fit, (2) best fit, and (3) first fit and choose the most suitable one, namely the worst-fit method for allocating flows to each channel. More importantly, we propose two heuristic algorithms—a priority assignment algorithm based on the greedy strategy for C (WF-C) and a priority assignment algorithm based on the greedy strategy for U(WF-U)—for assigning priorities to the flows in each channel, whose time complexity is [Formula: see text]. We then build a new simulation model to simulate the transmission of real-time flows in WirelessHART. Finally, we compare our two algorithms with WF-D and HLS algorithms in terms of the average value of the total end-to-end delay of flow sets, the ratio of schedulable flow sets, and the calculation time of the schedulability analysis. The optimal algorithm WF-C reduces the delay by up to [Formula: see text] and increases the schedulability ratio by up to [Formula: see text] , and it reduces the calculation time compared with the HLS algorithm.