AirTight: A Resilient Wireless Communication Protocol for Mixed-Criticality Systems

This paper describes the motivation, design, analysis and implementation of a new protocol for critical wireless communication called AirTight. Wireless communication has become a crucial part of the infrastructure of many cyber-physical applications. Many of these applications are real-time and also mixed-criticality, in that they have components/subsystems with different consequences of failure. Wireless communication is inevitably subject to levels of external interference. In this paper we represent this interference using a criticality-aware fault model; for each level of interference in the fault model we guarantee the timing behaviour of the protocol (i.e. we guarantee that packet deadlines are satisfied for certainly levels of criticality). Although a new protocol, AirTight is built upon existing standards such as IEEE 802.15.4. A prototype implementation and protocol-accurate simulator, which are also built upon existing technologies, demonstrate the effectiveness and functionality of the protocol.