Real-Time Control over Wireless Networks

TL;DR

This paper proposes scalable, distributed algorithms for routing and scheduling in industrial IoT wireless networks to improve reliability, energy efficiency, and real-time performance in dynamic environments.

Contribution

It introduces novel distributed routing and scheduling algorithms, latency minimization techniques, and a co-design approach for control and scheduling in industrial IoT wireless networks.

Findings

Enhanced network reliability through redundant routing

Energy-efficient local scheduling supporting network dynamics

Reduced latency in multi-network integration

Abstract

Industrial internet of Things (IIoT) are gaining popularity for use in large-scale applications such as oil-field management (e.g., $74\times 8$km$^2$ East Texas Oil-field), smart farming, smart manufacturing, smart grid, and data center power management. These applications require the wireless stack to provide a scalable, reliable, low-power and low-latency communication. To realize a predictable and reliable communication in a highly unreliable wireless environment, industrial wireless standards use a centralized wireless stack design. In a centralized wireless stack design, a central manager generates routes and a communication schedule for a multi-channel time division multiple access communication (TDMA) based medium access control (MAC). However, a centralized wireless stack design is highly energy consuming, not scalable, and does not support frequent changes to networks or workloads. To address these challenges, the following contributions are made in this dissertation: (1) A scalable and distributed routing algorithm for industrial IoT which generates graph routes, which offer a high degree of redundancy, (2) A local and online scheduling algorithm that is scalable, energy-efficient, and supports network/workload dynamics while ensuring reliability and real-time performance, (3) An approach to minimize latency for in-band integration of multiple low-power networks, (4) A fast and efficient test of schedulability that determines if an application meets the real-time performance requirement for given network topology, and (5) A distributed scheduling and control co-design that balances the control performance requirement and real-time performance for industrial IoT.