6,944 research outputs found
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
Control Aware Radio Resource Allocation in Low Latency Wireless Control Systems
We consider the problem of allocating radio resources over wireless
communication links to control a series of independent wireless control
systems. Low-latency transmissions are necessary in enabling time-sensitive
control systems to operate over wireless links with high reliability. Achieving
fast data rates over wireless links thus comes at the cost of reliability in
the form of high packet error rates compared to wired links due to channel
noise and interference. However, the effect of the communication link errors on
the control system performance depends dynamically on the control system state.
We propose a novel control-communication co-design approach to the low-latency
resource allocation problem. We incorporate control and channel state
information to make scheduling decisions over time on frequency, bandwidth and
data rates across the next-generation Wi-Fi based wireless communication links
that close the control loops. Control systems that are closer to instability or
further from a desired range in a given control cycle are given higher packet
delivery rate targets to meet. Rather than a simple priority ranking, we derive
precise packet error rate targets for each system needed to satisfy stability
targets and make scheduling decisions to meet such targets while reducing total
transmission time. The resulting Control-Aware Low Latency Scheduling (CALLS)
method is tested in numerous simulation experiments that demonstrate its
effectiveness in meeting control-based goals under tight latency constraints
relative to control-agnostic scheduling
Reliable Video Streaming over mmWave with Multi Connectivity and Network Coding
The next generation of multimedia applications will require the
telecommunication networks to support a higher bitrate than today, in order to
deliver virtual reality and ultra-high quality video content to the users. Most
of the video content will be accessed from mobile devices, prompting the
provision of very high data rates by next generation (5G) cellular networks. A
possible enabler in this regard is communication at mmWave frequencies, given
the vast amount of available spectrum that can be allocated to mobile users;
however, the harsh propagation environment at such high frequencies makes it
hard to provide a reliable service. This paper presents a reliable video
streaming architecture for mmWave networks, based on multi connectivity and
network coding, and evaluates its performance using a novel combination of the
ns-3 mmWave module, real video traces and the network coding library Kodo. The
results show that it is indeed possible to reliably stream video over cellular
mmWave links, while the combination of multi connectivity and network coding
can support high video quality with low latency.Comment: To be presented at the 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC), March 2018, Maui, Hawaii,
USA (invited paper). 6 pages, 4 figure
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