Adaptive real-time communication for wireless cyber-physical systems

Research output: Contribution to journalResearch articleContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Marco Zimmerling - , Center for Advancing Electronics Dresden (cfaed) (Author)
  • Luca Mottola - , Polytechnic University of Milan (Author)
  • Pratyush Kumar - , ETH Zurich (Author)
  • Federico Ferrari - , ETH Zurich (Author)
  • Lothar Thiele - , ETH Zurich (Author)

Abstract

Low-power wireless technology promises greater flexibility and lower costs in cyber-physical systems. To reap these benefits, communication protocols must deliver packets reliably within real-time deadlines across resource-constrained devices, while adapting to changes in application requirements (e.g., traffic demands) and network state (e.g., link qualities). Existing protocols do not solve all these challenges simultaneously, because their operation is either localized or a function of network state, which changes unpredictably over time. By contrast, this article claims a global approach that does not use network state information as input can overcome these limitations. The Blink protocol proves this claim by providing hard guarantees on endto- end deadlines of received packets in multi-hop low-power wireless networks, while seamlessly handling changes in application requirements and network state. We build Blink on the non-real-time Low-Power Wireless Bus (LWB) and design new scheduling algorithms based on the earliest-deadline-first policy. Using a dedicated priority queue data structure, we demonstrate a viable implementation of our algorithms on resource-constrained devices. Experiments show that Blink (i) meets all deadlines of received packets, (ii) delivers 99.97% of packets on a 94-node testbed, (iii) minimizes communication energy consumption within the limits of the underlying LWB, (iv) supports end-to-end deadlines of 100ms across four hops and nine sources, and (v) runs up to 4.1× faster than a conventional scheduler implementation on popular microcontrollers.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Article number8
JournalACM transactions on cyber-physical systems
Volume1
Issue number2
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Peer-reviewedYes

Keywords

Sustainable Development Goals

Keywords

  • Adaptivity, Earliest deadline first (EDF), Efficiency, End-to-end deadline, Glossy, Low-power platform, Low-power wireless bus (LWB), Priority queue data structure, Real-time communication, Real-world implementation, Reliability, Synchronous transmissions, Wireless multi-hop network