Many emerging applications based on wireless networks involve distributed control. This implies high requirements on reliability, but also on a predictable maximum delay and sometimes jitter. Further, many distributed control systems need to be constructed using off-the-shelf components, both due to cost constraints and due to interoperability with existing networks. This, in turn, implies that concurrent transmissions and multiuser detection are seldom possible. Instead, half-duplex time division multiple access (TDMA) is typically used. The total communication delay thereby depends on the packet error rate and the time until channel access is granted. With TDMA, channel access is upper-bounded and the jitter can be set to zero. With the aim to reduce the packet error rate given a certain deadline (a set of TDMA time-slots), we propose a novel relaying scheme, which can be implemented on top of off-the-shelf components. The paper includes a full analysis of the resulting error probability and latency. Numerical results show that the proposed relaying strategy significantly improves reliability given a certain maximum latency, or alternatively, reduces the latency, given a certain target reliability requirement. © 2016 IEEE.