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

End-To-End Deadlines over Dynamic Topologies

Despite the creativity of the scientific community and the funding agencies, the underlying model of computation behind IoT, WSN, cloud, edge, fog, and mist is fundamentally the same; Computational nodes which are dynamically interconnected to form a system in where both processing capacity and connectivity may vary over time. On top of such a system, we consider applications that need packets to flow along a path and adhere to end-to-end deadlines. This application model is motivated by both control and automation systems, as well as telecom systems. The challenge is to guarantee end-to-end deadlines when allowing nodes and applications to join or leave. The mainstream, and to some extent natural, approach to this is to relax the stringency of the constraint (e.g. use probabilistic guarantees, soft deadlines). In this paper we take a different approach and keep the end-to-end deadlines as hard constraints and instead partially limit the freedom of how nodes and applications are allowed to leave and join. We present a theoretical framework for modeling such systems along with proofs that deadlines are always honored

The Time-Triggered Wireless Architecture

Wirelessly interconnected sensors, actuators, and controllers promise greater flexibility, lower installation and maintenance costs, and higher robustness in harsh conditions than wired solutions. However, to facilitate the adoption of wireless communication in cyber-physical systems (CPS), the functional and non-functional properties must be similar to those known from wired architectures. We thus present Time-Triggered Wireless (TTW), a wireless architecture for multi-mode CPS that offers reliable communication with guarantees on end-to-end delays among distributed applications executing on low-cost, low-power embedded devices. We achieve this by exploiting the high reliability and deterministic behavior of a synchronous transmission based communication stack we design, and by coupling the timings of distributed task executions and message exchanges across the wireless network by solving a novel co-scheduling problem. While some of the concepts in TTW have existed for some time and TTW has already been successfully applied for feedback control and coordination of multiple mechanical systems with closed-loop stability guarantees, this paper presents the key algorithmic, scheduling, and networking mechanisms behind TTW, along with their experimental evaluation, which have not been known so far. TTW is open source and ready to use: https://ttw.ethz.ch

RT-ByzCast: Byzantine-Resilient Real-Time Reliable Broadcast

Today’s cyber-physical systems face various impediments to achieving their intended goals, namely, communication uncertainties and faults, relative to the increased integration of networked and wireless devices, hinder the synchronism needed to meet real-time deadlines. Moreover, being critical, these systems are also exposed to significant security threats. This threat combination increases the risk of physical damage. This paper addresses these problems by studying how to build the first real-time Byzantine reliable broadcast protocol (RTBRB) tolerating network uncertainties, faults, and attacks. Previous literature describes either real-time reliable broadcast protocols, or asynchronous (non real-time) Byzantine ones. We first prove that it is impossible to implement RTBRB using traditional distributed computing paradigms, e.g., where the error/failure detection mechanisms of processes are decoupled from the broadcast algorithm itself, even with the help of the most powerful failure detectors. We circumvent this impossibility by proposing RT-ByzCast, an algorithm based on aggregating digital signatures in a sliding time-window and on empowering processes with self-crashing capabilities to mask and bound losses. We show that RT-ByzCast (i) operates in real-time by proving that messages broadcast by correct processes are delivered within a known bounded delay, and (ii) is reliable by demonstrating that correct processes using our algorithm crash themselves with a negligible probability, even with message loss rates as high as 60%

Synchronous Transmissions in Low-Power Wireless: A Survey of Communication Protocols and Network Services

Low-power wireless communication is a central building block of Cyber-physical Systems and the Internet of Things. Conventional low-power wireless protocols make avoiding packet collisions a cornerstone design choice. The concept of synchronous transmissions challenges this view. As collisions are not necessarily destructive, under specific circumstances, commodity low-power wireless radios are often able to receive useful information even in the presence of superimposed signals from different transmitters. We survey the growing number of protocols that exploit synchronous transmissions for higher robustness and efficiency as well as unprecedented functionality and versatility compared to conventional designs. The illustration of protocols based on synchronous transmissions is cast in a conceptional framework we establish, with the goal of highlighting differences and similarities among the proposed solutions. We conclude the paper with a discussion on open research questions in this field.Comment: Submitted to ACM Computing Survey

FAULT-TOLERANT AND REAL-TIME WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORK FOR CONTROL SYSTEM

Wireless control systems (WCSs) enable several advantages over traditional wired industrial monitoring and control systems, including self-organization, flexibility, rapid deployment, and lower maintenance. However, wireless network delay and packet loss can result in two main challenges for the control system: instability and performance degradation. This dissertation aims at solving the instability and performance degradation challenges by developing fault-tolerance and real-time approaches for a WCS. For the instability challenge, we first developed a fault-tolerant network design and a novel model to meet the control system stability requirement for one-way wireless transmission. The evaluation results showed that our model was accurate with average 4.1\% difference from the simulation result. We scaled the work to two-way wireless transmission to meet the control system stability requirement by analyzing the worst-case end-to-end delay. We carried out an analysis to calculate the maximum number of conflicts that could happen during one message transmission, and then derived the worst-case end-to-end delay. The simulation results showed that our end-to-end delay analysis was accurate within 4.2\% of realistic simulation results. For the performance degradation challenge, we explored a hybrid offline-online network reconfiguration framework with time-varying link failures to improve control system performance for the WCS with a single physical system. Accordingly, a precise network imperfection model and six reconfiguration algorithms had been developed to quantify and improve the performance, respectively. The case study results showed that our network imperfection model was accurate with Pearson correlation 0.993 and our network reconfiguration approach performed better than the state-of-the-art static scheme. To improve the overall control system performance for the WCS with multiple physical systems, we studied a dynamic packet assignment approach. The case study results demonstrated that our approach was effective in improving the overall control system performance