Performance Enhancement of Limited-Bandwidth Industrial Control Systems

Abstract

Due to its portability, reliability, flexibility, real time and rich set of QoS support, Data Distribution Service (DDs) middleware became one of the best solutions for real time distributed manufacturing systems. Most of these systems are composed of heterogeneous networked devices where network bandwidth represents a very important resource. Those devices include limited-resources devices, such as sensors, actuators and controllers. Thus, controlling such resource will significantly enhance the overall performance of the network in terms of resource utilization, delay, and throughput; moreover, it reduces the cost of using leased network bandwidth by limiting the amount of bandwidth as much as needed. In this paper we propose a solution for controlling the limited-bandwidth networked manufacturing systems by using DDS; and we describe the DDS QoS polices that support manufacturing systems to control network bandwidth. Furthermore, we evaluate DDS middleware performance over Bluetooth channel by measuring latency, throughput and jitter; and examining different QoS parameters to show their effect on improving the existing limited-bandwidth networks.