Real-time communication platfrom for wireless cyber-physical applications

Abstract

A Cyber-Physical System (CPS) is a physical system whose operations are monitored, coordinated, and controlled by computation and communication processes. Applying wireless technologies to cyber-physical systems can significantly enhance the system mobility and reduce the deployment and maintenance cost. Existing wireless technologies, however either cannot provide real-time or probabilistic guarantee on packet delivery or are not fast enough to support desired application requirements. Nondeterministic packet transmission and insufficiently high sampling rate will severely hurt application performance. To address this problem, we propose a real-time wireless communication platform called RT-WiFi. In this dissertation, we present our design and implementation of the data link layer and network management framework of RT-WiFi platform that provides predictable packet delivery and high sampling rate. The RT-WiFi communication platform is designed to support configurable components for adjusting design trade-offs including sampling rate, latency variance, reliability and thus can serve as a suitable communication platform for supporting a wide range of wireless CPS applications. Based on the RT-WiFi management platform, we further propose advanced network management techniques to provide jitter-free scheduling algorithm for improving system performance and to support reliable data transmission in noisy environments. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and to verify the efficiency of our network management platform, we conduct a series of experiments and a case study that integrate the RT-WiFi communication platform with a health care CPS application to investigate the application performance in the real world.