Wireless Sensor/Actuator Network Design for Mobile Control Applications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a reliable application-level design methodology for wireless sensor/actuator networks in mobile control applications, addressing wireless unreliability and real-time constraints through experimental analysis and simulation.

Contribution

It introduces a platform-independent design approach and a novel method to handle packet loss, validated by experiments and simulations.

Findings

Effective packet loss mitigation method for WSANs

Experimental link quality characterization

Promising simulation results demonstrating approach effectiveness

Abstract

Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging as a new generation of sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will enable an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the unreliability of wireless communications and the real-time requirements of control applications raise great challenges for WSAN design. With emphasis on the reliability issue, this paper presents an application-level design methodology for WSANs in mobile control applications. The solution is generic in that it is independent of the underlying platforms, environment, control system models, and controller design. To capture the link quality characteristics in terms of packet loss rate, experiments are conducted on a real WSAN system. From the experimental observations, a simple yet efficient method is proposed to deal with unpredictable packet loss on actuator nodes. Trace-based simulations give promising results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.