RT-WiFi networks for wireless cyber-physical applications

Applying wireless technologies to cyber-physical systems (CPSs) has received significant attention owing to their great advantages in enhanced system mobility and reduced deployment and maintenance cost. However, existing wireless technologies either cannot provide the real-time guarantee on packet delivery or do not have enough bandwidth to satisfy the requirements of cyber-physical applications. To satisfy the communication requirements in the wireless infrastructure for cyber-physical applications, we design a flexible real-time high-speed wireless communication platform called RT-WiFi to support a wide range of wireless cyber-physical applications. RT-WiFi is designed to provide deterministic timing guarantee on packet delivery with adjustable sampling rate. It features a set of configurable components for adjusting design trade-offs including sampling rate, latency variance, reliability and compatibility to Wi-Fi networks. In this dissertation, we first present the design and implementation of the RT-WiFi MAC layer. Based on the RT-WiFi MAC layer, we present network management techniques that schedule resources in RT-WiFi networks. For network management techniques, we first describe the jitter-free scheduling algorithm that minimizes the communication jitter under both static and dynamic topologies. Then we present the scheduling algorithms to coordinate channel assignments and packet transmissions in RT-WiFi networks containing multiple access points. We conduct a series of experiments and simulations to validate the design and demonstrate the advantages of RT-WiFi and the proposed network management algorithms. A case study that integrates RT-WiFi with a real cyber-physical application is included to show its performance in real world applications.