  Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) networks must meet strict reliability,
latency, and low energy consumption requirements. However, traditional
low-power wireless protocols are ineffective in finding a sweet spot for
balancing these performance metrics. Recently, network flooding protocols based
on Synchronous Transmissions (STX) have been proposed for better performance in
reliability-critical IIoT, where simultaneous transmissions are possible
without packet collisions. STX-based protocols can offer a competitive edge
over routing-based protocols, particularly in dependability. However, they
notably suffer from the beating effect, a physical layer phenomenon that
results in sinusoidal interference across a packet and, consequently, packet
loss. Thus, we introduce STX-Vote, an error correction scheme that can handle
errors caused by beating effects. Importantly, we utilize transmission
redundancy already inherent within STX protocols so do not incur additional
on-air overhead. Through simulation, we demonstrate STX-Vote can provide a 40%
increase in reliability. We subsequently implement STX-Vote on nRF52840-DK
devices and perform extensive experiments. The results confirm that STX-Vote
improves reliability by 25-28% for BLE 5 PHYs and 8% for IEEE 802.15.4; thus,
it can complement existing error correction schemes.
