In industrial applications, sensor networks have to satisfy specified time requirements of exchanged messages. IEEE 802.15.4 defines the communication protocol of the physical and medium access control layers for wireless sensor networks, which support real-time transmission through guaranteed time slots (GTSs). In order to improve the performance of IEEE 802.15.4 in industrial applications, this paper proposes a new traffic scheduling algorithm for GTS. This algorithm concentrates on time-critical industrial periodic messages and determines the values of network and node parameters for GTS. It guarantees real-time requirements of periodic messages for industrial automation systems up to the order of tens to hundreds of milliseconds depending on the traffic condition of the network system. A series of simulation results are obtained to examine the validity of the scheduling algorithm proposed in this study. The simulation results show that this scheduling algorithm not only guarantees real-time requirements for periodic message but also improves the scalability, bandwidth utilization, and energy efficiency of the network with a slight modification of the existing IEEE 802.15.4 protocol.