4,016 research outputs found
Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks
Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging
applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require
update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless technology is
preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if
the devices support multi-hop communication. So far, however, feedback control
over wireless multi-hop networks has only been shown for update intervals on
the order of seconds. This paper presents a wireless embedded system that tames
imperfections impairing control performance (e.g., jitter and message loss),
and a control design that exploits the essential properties of this system to
provably guarantee closed-loop stability for physical processes with linear
time-invariant dynamics. Using experiments on a cyber-physical testbed with 20
wireless nodes and multiple cart-pole systems, we are the first to demonstrate
and evaluate feedback control and coordination over wireless multi-hop networks
for update intervals of 20 to 50 milliseconds.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in: 10th ACM/IEEE International
Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (with CPS-IoT Week 2019) (ICCPS '19),
April 16--18, 2019, Montreal, QC, Canad
Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead
While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks
Wireless Communication in Process Control Loop: Requirements Analysis, Industry Practices and Experimental Evaluation
Wireless communication is already used in process automation for process monitoring. The next stage of implementation of wireless technology in industrial applications is for process control. The need for wireless networked control systems has evolved because of the necessity for extensibility, mobility, modularity, fast deployment, and reduced installation and maintenance cost. These benefits are only applicable given that the wireless network of choice can meet the strict requirements of process control applications, such as latency. In this regard, this paper is an effort towards identifying current industry practices related to implementing process control over a wireless link and evaluates the suitability of ISA100.11a network for use in process control through experiments
Self-Synchronization in Duty-cycled Internet of Things (IoT) Applications
In recent years, the networks of low-power devices have gained popularity.
Typically these devices are wireless and interact to form large networks such
as the Machine to Machine (M2M) networks, Internet of Things (IoT), Wearable
Computing, and Wireless Sensor Networks. The collaboration among these devices
is a key to achieving the full potential of these networks. A major problem in
this field is to guarantee robust communication between elements while keeping
the whole network energy efficient. In this paper, we introduce an extended and
improved emergent broadcast slot (EBS) scheme, which facilitates collaboration
for robust communication and is energy efficient. In the EBS, nodes
communication unit remains in sleeping mode and are awake just to communicate.
The EBS scheme is fully decentralized, that is, nodes coordinate their wake-up
window in partially overlapped manner within each duty-cycle to avoid message
collisions. We show the theoretical convergence behavior of the scheme, which
is confirmed through real test-bed experimentation.Comment: 12 Pages, 11 Figures, Journa
Statistical Delay Bound for WirelessHART Networks
In this paper we provide a performance analysis framework for wireless
industrial networks by deriving a service curve and a bound on the delay
violation probability. For this purpose we use the (min,x) stochastic network
calculus as well as a recently presented recursive formula for an end-to-end
delay bound of wireless heterogeneous networks. The derived results are mapped
to WirelessHART networks used in process automation and were validated via
simulations. In addition to WirelessHART, our results can be applied to any
wireless network whose physical layer conforms the IEEE 802.15.4 standard,
while its MAC protocol incorporates TDMA and channel hopping, like e.g.
ISA100.11a or TSCH-based networks. The provided delay analysis is especially
useful during the network design phase, offering further research potential
towards optimal routing and power management in QoS-constrained wireless
industrial networks.Comment: Accepted at PE-WASUN 201
Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?
The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks
has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily
reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this
concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key
component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic
patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to
these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly
reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN
introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of
dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control
requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN
Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed
other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable
performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We
evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how
utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN
control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against
other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and
establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across
latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics
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