Efficient Holistic Control over Industrial Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

Process automation is embracing wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) in the era of Industrial Internet. Despite the success of WSANs for monitoring applications, feedback control poses significant challenges due to data loss and stringent energy constraints in WSANs. Holistic control adopts a cyber-physical system approach to overcome the challenges by orchestrating network reconfiguration and process control at run time. In this paper, we explore efficient holistic control designs to maintain control performance while reducing the communication cost. The contributions of this work are four-fold: (1) We introduce a holistic control architecture that integrates low-power wireless bus (LWB) and two control strategies, rate adaptation and self-triggered control, specifically proposed to reduce communication cost; (2) We design novel wireless network mechanisms to support rate adaptation and self-triggered control, respectively, in a multi-hop WSAN; (3) We build a real-time network-in-the-loop simulator that integrates MATLAB/Simulink and a three-floor WSAN testbed to evaluate wireless control systems; (4) We empirically explore the tradeoff between communication cost and control performance under alternative holistic control approaches. Our case studies show that rate adaptation and self-triggered control offer advantages in control performance and energy efficiency, respectively, in normal operating conditions. The advantage in energy efficiency of self-triggered control, however, may diminish under harsh physical and wireless conditions due to the cost of recovering from data loss and physical disturbances.