Resilient Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

Abstract:

Wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSAN) are systems consisting of numerous sensing and actuation devices that interact with the environment and coordinate their activities over a wireless communication network. WSANs represent an important class of cyber-physical system (CPS) found in the national power grid and air/traffic networks. This project addresses the issue of resilience in WSANs. A resilient system is one that maintains an active awareness of surrounding threats and reacts to those threats in a manner   that returns the system to operational normalcy in finite time. It has proven challenging to ensure resilience in large-scale WSANs because of the complexity such scale brings. This project’s approach rests on two fundamental trends that have the potential to transform the way we manage CPS. One trend concerns the revolution in machine‐to‐machine (M2M) communication networks that promise wireless networking with greater peak bit-rates and reliability than previously possible. Another trend concerns recent results that take advantage of the information transported over the physical component of a CPS to dramatically reduce the bit-rates required across the wireless channel. These results are based on recent advances that treat quantization and event-triggered feedback in a unified manner. By integrating these innovations from controls and communications into a layered and distributed control architecture that is characteristic of many intelligent control  systems, the systems developed in this project promise an unprecedented level of resilience to transient and crash faults. The project will evaluate and demonstrate this integrated control/communication approach to resilience on a multi-robotic testbed consisting of both unmanned ground and aerial vehicles. The testbed integrates M2M communication wireless networking hardware/software with a resilient multi-robot control architecture addressing both task coordination and platform stabilization.

  • National CPS PI Meeting 2013
  • Poster
  • Academia
  • CPS PI Poster Session
  • CPS Domains
  • Transportation Systems Sector
  • Control
  • Critical Infrastructure
  • Wireless Sensing and Actuation
  • Transportation
  • CPS Technologies
  • Foundations
Submitted by Michael Lemmon on