Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging as a new generation of sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will enable an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the unreliability of
wireless communications and the real-time requirements of control applications raise great challenges for WSAN design. With emphasis on the reliability issue, this paper presents an application-level design methodology for WSANs in mobile control applications. The solution is generic in that it is independent of the underlying platforms, environment, control system models, and controller design. To capture the link quality characteristics in terms of packet loss rate, experiments are conducted on a real WSAN system. From the experimental observations, a simple yet efficient method is proposed to deal with unpredictable packet loss on actuator nodes. Trace-based simulations give promising results, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.
For microprocessors used in real-time embedded systems, minimizing power consumption is difficult due to the timing constraints. Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) has been incorporated into modern microprocessors as a promising technique for exploring th
e trade-off between energy consumption and system performance. However, it remains a challenge to realize the potential of DVS in unpredictable environments where the system workload cannot be accurately known. Addressing system-level power-aware design for DVS-enabled embedded controllers, this paper establishes an analytical model for the DVS system that encompasses multiple real-time control tasks. From this model, a feedback control based approach to power management is developed to reduce dynamic power consumption while achieving good application performance. With this approach, the unpredictability and variability of task execution times can be attacked. Thanks to the use of feedback control theory, predictable performance of the DVS system is achieved, which is favorable to real-time applications. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.
With traditional open-loop scheduling of network resources, the quality-of-control (QoC) of networked control systems (NCSs) may degrade significantly in the presence of limited bandwidth and variable workload. The goal of this work is to maximize th
e overall QoC of NCSs through dynamically allocating available network bandwidth. Based on codesign of control and scheduling, an integrated feedback scheduler is developed to enable flexible QoC management in dynamic environments. It encompasses a cascaded feedback scheduling module for sampling period adjustment and a direct feedback scheduling module for priority modification. The inherent characteristics of priority-driven control networks make it feasible to implement the proposed feedback scheduler in real-world systems. Extensive simulations show that the proposed approach leads to significant QoC improvement over the traditional open-loop scheduling scheme under both underloaded and overloaded network conditions.
Many embedded real-time control systems suffer from resource constraints and dynamic workload variations. Although optimal feedback scheduling schemes are in principle capable of maximizing the overall control performance of multitasking control syst
ems, most of them induce excessively large computational overheads associated with the mathematical optimization routines involved and hence are not directly applicable to practical systems. To optimize the overall control performance while minimizing the overhead of feedback scheduling, this paper proposes an efficient feedback scheduling scheme based on feedforward neural networks. Using the optimal solutions obtained offline by mathematical optimization methods, a back-propagation (BP) neural network is designed to adapt online the sampling periods of concurrent control tasks with respect to changes in computing resource availability. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the computational overhead significantly while delivering almost the same overall control performance as compared to optimal feedback scheduling.
The quality of control (QoC) of a resource-constrained embedded control system may be jeopardized in dynamic environments with variable workload. This gives rise to the increasing demand of co-design of control and scheduling. To deal with uncertaint
ies in resource availability, a fuzzy feedback scheduling (FFS) scheme is proposed in this paper. Within the framework of feedback scheduling, the sampling periods of control loops are dynamically adjusted using the fuzzy control technique. The feedback scheduler provides QoC guarantees in dynamic environments through maintaining the CPU utilization at a desired level. The framework and design methodology of the proposed FFS scheme are described in detail. A simplified mobile robot target tracking system is investigated as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FFS scheme. The scheme is independent of task execution times, robust to measurement noises, and easy to implement, while incurring only a small overhead.
