Universal Serial Bus as a Communication Medium for Prototype Networked Data Acquisition and Control Systems - Performance Optimisation and Evaluation

Universal serial bus can be considered a cost-effective and high-throughput communication medium for sensor networks and multinode control or data acquisition systems, especially for prototyping purposes. In a prototype system, a PC or Mac computer with a general-purpose operating system is often selected as a host or root node for the USB bus and it acts as a central data collector, supervisory user interface, and network traffic scheduler. However, achieved communication performance is often unsatisfactory since USB stack drivers incorporated in Windows, Linux, or macOS operating systems are not optimised for such specific purposes. The paper shows how an appropriately selected and implemented user application communication schedule, making use of operating system drivers pipelining and multitasking capabilities, can substantially improve USB network throuahnut and reduce communication latency.