Traffic Generation Rate Control of Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Abstract

The traffic generation rate of the network used for cyber-physical systems is a crucial design parameter since it directly affects the stability of physical systems and the congestion level of communication systems. In this paper, we propose a novel modeling framework of the general wireless sensor and actuator networks of cyber-physical systems where the sensor-controller and controller-actuator sides communicate over a lossy network. The performance model is then used to derive the optimal traffic generation rate of sensors and controllers for minimizing the maximum outage probability of the stability constraint of the control systems while guaranteeing a schedulability constraint. The resulting problem is a non-linear optimization problem which allows to obtain the global optimum. An efficient approximation converts the proposed optimization problem into a linear programming problem. One interesting finding is that the optimal solution assigns higher traffic generate rate on the controller-actuator link compared to the one of the sensor-controller link since the actuating-link is more critical to guarantee the stability of the control systems.