Work-in-Progress: Wireless Network Reconfiguration for Control Systems

Control systems using sensors and wireless networks are becoming more prevalent, due to its ease of deployment: no wires and longer battery life. However, network delays and packet losses can degrade control system performance, which leads us to find the optimal network configuration to minimize that impact. Another main difficulty of having wireless networks for control systems is caused by interference and noise that produce time-varying fault patterns, which motivates us to do network reconfiguration at run time. To solve these two issues, we propose a network reconfiguration framework with offline and online components that considers time-correlated link failures. We are conducting a case study to wirelessly control a nonlinear primary heat exchanger system in a small modular nuclear reactor of a nuclear power plant.