D-SAR: A Distributed Scheduling Algorithm for Real-time, Closed-Loop Control in Industrial Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Current wireless standards and protocols for industrial applications such as WirelessHART and ISA100.11a typically use centralized network management techniques for communication scheduling and route establishment. However, large-scale centralized systems can have several drawbacks. They have difficulty in coping with disturbances or changes within the network in real-time. Large-scale centralized systems can also have highly variable latencies thus making them unsuitable for closed-loop control applications. To address these problems, this paper describes D-SAR, a distributed resource reservation algorithm which would allow source nodes to meet the Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements of the application in real-time, when carrying out peer-to-peer communication. The presented solution uses concepts derived from relevant networking-related domains such as circuit switching and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) networks and applies them to wireless sensor and actuator networks

Optimisation- based time slot assignment and synchronisation for TDMA MAC in industrial wireless sensor network

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/166209/1/cmu2bf02232.pd

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

Priority Assignment for Real-Time Flows in WirelessHART Sensor-Actuator Networks

Recent years have witnessed the adoption of wireless sensor-actuator networks as a communication infrastructure for process control applications. An important enabling technology for industrial process control is WirelessHART, an open wireless sensor-actuator network standard specifically developed for process industries. A key challenge faced byWirelessHART networks is to meet the stringent real-time communication requirements imposed by feedback control systems in process industries. Fixed priority scheduling, a popular scheduling policy in real-time networks, has recently been shown to be an effective real-time transmission scheduling policy in WirelessHART networks. Priority assignment has a major impact on the schedulability of real-time flows in these networks. This paper investigates the open problem of priority assignment for periodic real-time flows for feedback control loops closed through a WirelessHART network. We first propose an optimal priority assignment algorithm based on branch and bound for any given worst case delay analysis. We then propose an efficient heuristic search algorithm for priority assignment. We also identify special cases where the heuristic search is optimal. Simulations based on random networks and the real topology of a physical sensor network testbed showed that the heuristic search algorithm achieved near optimal performance in terms of schedulability, while significantly outperforming traditional real-time priority assignment policies

Real-Time and Energy-Efficient Routing for Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

With the emergence of industrial standards such as WirelessHART, process industries are adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) that enable sensors and actuators to communicate through low-power wireless mesh networks. Industrial monitoring and control applications require real-time communication among sensors, controllers and actuators within end-to-end deadlines. Deadline misses may lead to production inefficiency, equipment destruction to irreparable financial and environmental impacts. Moreover, due to the large geographic area and harsh conditions of many industrial plants, it is labor-intensive or dan- gerous to change batteries of field devices. It is therefore important to achieve long network lifetime with battery-powered devices. This dissertation tackles these challenges and make a series of contributions. (1) We present a new end-to-end delay analysis for feedback control loops whose transmissions are scheduled based on the Earliest Deadline First policy. (2) We propose a new real-time routing algorithm that increases the real-time capacity of WSANs by exploiting the insights of the delay analysis. (3) We develop an energy-efficient routing algorithm to improve the network lifetime while maintaining path diversity for reliable communication. (4) Finally, we design a distributed game-theoretic algorithm to allocate sensing applications with near-optimal quality of sensing

Análise do impacto da comunicação em redes wirelesshart no desempenho de sistemas de controle

Este trabalho analisa o uso do protocolo WirelessHART para a implementação de sistemas de controle em laço fechado. São discutidas possíveis arquiteturas de implementação de laços de controle, as quais se diferem basicamente pelo local na arquitetura do sistema de controle em rede em que o controlador será executado. Optou-se pela análise do comportamento do protocolo WirelessHART numa arquitetura que considera o módulo de controle localizado num dispositivo host, o qual se comunica via HART-UDP com o gateway da rede. Para a análise da proposta desta dissertação foram descritos os mecanismos necessários para a realização do laço de controle sobre uma rede WirelessHART real, em um ambiente que apresenta todas as características de uma instalação industrial. Os resultados obtidos mostram que, com a arquitetura proposta, o laço de controle apresenta latências não determinísticas. Para a realização deste trabalho, foram apresentados dois estudos de caso: (i) o controle de uma válvula comumente utilizada na indústria de petróleo; (ii) e um processo simulado, que considera um controlador baseado em eventos, onde o sinal de controle é calculado de acordo com os tempos de comunicação permitidos pela rede entre o controlador e o processo. Os resultados obtidos mostram que é possível efetuar controle apesar dos atrasos ocasionados pela rede, desde que sejam levados em conta estes atrasos no cálculo do sinal de controle, podendo assim mostrar há degradação no desempenho do sistema sob controle.This work analyzes the use of WirelessHART protocol for the implementation of closed-loop control systems. It discusses possible architectures for implementing control loops, which differ by the location where the controller is executing. For the performance evaluation of the WirelessHART protocol behavior, an architecture that considers the control module located in a device, which communicates via Hart-UDP with the network gateway. The Experimental evaluations presented in this dissertation were performed in a setting that has all the characteristics of an industrial installation. The results showed that in the proposed architecture, the control loop has not deterministic latencies. Two case studies were carried on: (i) the control of a valve commonly used in oil and gas industrial applications; (ii) and a simulated process that considers an event-based controller where the control signal is calculated according to the communication time allowed by the network between the controller and the process. The results show that it is possible to perform control despite network delays, when taking into account the delays in the calculation of the control signal