Network Resource Management in Wireless Networked Control Systems

Wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) are fundamental to many Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications and must work under real-time constraints in order to ensure timely collection of environmental data and proper delivery of control decisions. The Quality of Service (QoS) offered by a WNCS is thus often measured by how well it satisfies the end-to-end deadlines of the real-time tasks executed in the WNCS. Network resource management in WNCSs plays a critical role in achieving the desired QoS. Unexpected internal and external disturbances that may appear in WNCSs concurrently make resource management inherently challenging. The explosive growth of IoT applications especially in terms of their scale and complexity further exacerbate the level of difficulty in network resource management.

In this talk, I first give a general introduction of WNCSs and the challenges that they present to network resource management. In particular, I will discuss the complications due to external disturbances and the need for dynamic data-link layer scheduling. I then highlight our recent work that aims at tackling this challenge. Our work balances the scheduling effort between a gateway (or access points) and the rest of the nodes in a network. It paves the way towards decentralized network resource management in order to achieve scalability. Experimental implementation on a wireless testbed further validates the applicability of our proposed techniques. I will end the talk outlining our on-going effort in this exciting and growing area of research.