Cooperation among vehicles and mobile robotic systems in industrial environments relies on wireless communication. Future roadmaps envision the integration of high-data-rate sensor streams to enhance the performance of such cooperative systems. However, the state-of-the-art in both 802.11 and cellular communication suffers from prolonged and non-deterministic connection losses, lasting up to several seconds, during roaming. As a result, the reliable transmission of large and latency-critical data in such scenarios becomes impractical. For small control data, this issue has been mitigated using redundant data streams. However, this approach is not viable for perception data streams due to excessive resource demands.

As part of the IECON 2025 – 51st Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society we present an implementation of mechanisms designed to address this challenge, with a focus on seamless deployment in industrial environments using 802.11 and Ethernet TSN backbones. Our physical model truck demonstrator confirmed the feasibility of reliable sample exchange during roaming for data rates up to 25 Mbit/s without active redundancy.

Figure 1: Sample latencies for different sample sizes during handover with the continuous streaming approach. The momentary interruption, marked by the latency peak, is fully covered by the BEC slack.
Figure 1: Sample latencies for different sample sizes during handover with the continuous streaming approach. The momentary interruption, marked by the latency peak, is fully covered by the BEC slack.