skip to main content


Title: A Flexible Retransmission Policy for Industrial Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks
Real-time and reliable communication is essential for industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks. To this end, researchers have proposed a wide range of transmission scheduling techniques. However, these methods usually employ a link-centric policy which allocates a fixed number of retransmissions for each link of a flow. The lack of flexibility of this approach is problematic because failures do not occur uniformly across links and link quality changes over time. In this paper, we propose a flow-centric policy to flexibly and dynamically reallocate retransmissions among the links of a multi-hop flow at runtime. This contribution is complemented by a method for determining the number of retransmissions necessary to achieve a user-specified reliability level under two failures models that capture the common wireless properties of industrial environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of flow centric policies using empirical evaluations and trace-driven simulations. Testbed experiments indicate a flow-centric policy can provide higher reliability than a link-centric policy because of its flexibility. Trace-driven experiments compare link-centric and flow-centric policies under the two reliability models. Results indicate that when the two approaches are configured to achieve the same reliability level, a flow-centric approach increases the median real-time capacity by as much as 1.42 times and reduces the end-to-end response times by as much as 2.63 times.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1750155
NSF-PAR ID:
10094534
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
2018 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet (ICII)
Page Range / eLocation ID:
79 to 88
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. The next generation of Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems will require wireless solutions to connect sensors, actuators, and controllers as part of feedback-control loops over real-time flows. A key challenge in such networks is to provide predictable performance and adaptability to variations in link quality. We address this challenge by developing Receiver Oriented Policies (RECORP), which leverages the stability of IIoT workloads to build a solution that combines offline policy synthesis and run-time adaptation. Compared to schedules that service a single flow in a slot, RECORP policies share slots among multiple flows by assigning a coordinator and a set of candidate flows in the same slot. At run-time, the coordinator will dynamically execute one of the flows depending on what flows the coordinator has already received. The net effect of this strategy is that a node can dynamically repurpose the retransmissions remaining after receiving the data of an incoming flow to service other incoming flows opportunistically. Therefore, the flows that are executed in a slot can be adapted in response to the variable link conditions observed at run-time. Furthermore, RECORP also provides predictable performance: a policy meets the end-to-end reliability and deadline constraints of flows given probabilistic link qualities. When RECORP policies and schedules are configured to meet the same end-to-end reliability target of 99%, larger-scale multihop simulations show that across typical IIoT workloads, policies provided a median improvement of 1.63 to 2.44 times in real-time capacity as well as a median reduction of 1.45 to 2.43 times in worst-case latency. 
    more » « less
  2. Future Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) systems will require wireless solutions to connect sensors, actuators, and controllers as part of high data rate feedback-control loops over real-time flows. A key challenge in such networks is to provide predictable performance and adaptability in response to link quality variations. We address this challenge by developing RECeiver ORiented Policies (Recorp), which leverages the stability of IIoT workloads by combining offline policy synthesis and run-time adaptation. Compared to schedules that service a single flow in a slot, Recorp policies share slots among multiple flows by assigning a coordinator and a list of flows that may be serviced in the same slot. At run-time, the coordinator will execute one of the flows depending on which flows the coordinator has already received. A salient feature of Recorp is that it provides predictable performance: a policy meets the end-to-end reliability and deadline of flows when the link quality exceeds a user-specified threshold. Experiments show that across IIoT workloads, policies provided a median increase of 50% to 142% in real-time capacity and a median decrease of 27% to 70% in worst-case latency when schedules and policies are configured to meet an end-to-end reliability of 99%. 
    more » « less
  3. null (Ed.)
    Emerging Industrial Internet-of-Things systems require wireless solutions to connect sensors, actuators, and controllers as part of high data rate feedback-control loops over real-time flows. A key challenge is to provide predictable performance and agility in response to fluctuations in link quality, variable workloads, and topology changes. We propose WARP to address this challenge. WARP uses programs to specify a network’s behavior and includes a synthesis procedure to automatically generate such programs from a high-level specification of the system’s workload and topology. WARP has three unique features: (1) WARP uses a domain-specific language to specify stateful programs that include conditional statements to control when a flow’s packets are transmitted. The execution paths of programs depend on the pattern of packet losses observed at runtime, thereby enabling WARP to readily adapt to packet losses due to short-term variations in link quality. (2) Our synthesis technique uses heuristics to improve network performance by considering multiple packet loss patterns and associated execution paths when determining the transmissions performed by nodes. Furthermore, the generated programs ensure that the likelihood of a flow delivering its packets by its deadline exceeds a user-specified threshold. (3) WARP can adapt to workload and topology changes without explicitly reconstructing a network’s program based on the observation that nodes can independently synthesize the same program when they share the same workload and topology information. Simulations show that WARP improves network throughput for data collection, dissemination, and mixed workloads on two realistic topologies. Testbed experiments show that WARP reduces the time to add new flows by 5 times over a state-of-the-art centralized control plane and guarantees the real-time and reliability of all flows. 
    more » « less
  4. ABSTRACT Introduction

    Remote military operations require rapid response times for effective relief and critical care. Yet, the military theater is under austere conditions, so communication links are unreliable and subject to physical and virtual attacks and degradation at unpredictable times. Immediate medical care at these austere locations requires semi-autonomous teleoperated systems, which enable the completion of medical procedures even under interrupted networks while isolating the medics from the dangers of the battlefield. However, to achieve autonomy for complex surgical and critical care procedures, robots require extensive programming or massive libraries of surgical skill demonstrations to learn effective policies using machine learning algorithms. Although such datasets are achievable for simple tasks, providing a large number of demonstrations for surgical maneuvers is not practical. This article presents a method for learning from demonstration, combining knowledge from demonstrations to eliminate reward shaping in reinforcement learning (RL). In addition to reducing the data required for training, the self-supervised nature of RL, in conjunction with expert knowledge-driven rewards, produces more generalizable policies tolerant to dynamic environment changes. A multimodal representation for interaction enables learning complex contact-rich surgical maneuvers. The effectiveness of the approach is shown using the cricothyroidotomy task, as it is a standard procedure seen in critical care to open the airway. In addition, we also provide a method for segmenting the teleoperator’s demonstration into subtasks and classifying the subtasks using sequence modeling.

    Materials and Methods

    A database of demonstrations for the cricothyroidotomy task was collected, comprising six fundamental maneuvers referred to as surgemes. The dataset was collected by teleoperating a collaborative robotic platform—SuperBaxter, with modified surgical grippers. Then, two learning models are developed for processing the dataset—one for automatic segmentation of the task demonstrations into a sequence of surgemes and the second for classifying each segment into labeled surgemes. Finally, a multimodal off-policy RL with rewards learned from demonstrations was developed to learn the surgeme execution from these demonstrations.

    Results

    The task segmentation model has an accuracy of 98.2%. The surgeme classification model using the proposed interaction features achieved a classification accuracy of 96.25% averaged across all surgemes compared to 87.08% without these features and 85.4% using a support vector machine classifier. Finally, the robot execution achieved a task success rate of 93.5% compared to baselines of behavioral cloning (78.3%) and a twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient with shaped rewards (82.6%).

    Conclusions

    Results indicate that the proposed interaction features for the segmentation and classification of surgical tasks improve classification accuracy. The proposed method for learning surgemes from demonstrations exceeds popular methods for skill learning. The effectiveness of the proposed approach demonstrates the potential for future remote telemedicine on battlefields.

     
    more » « less
  5. Underwater networks of wireless sensors deployed along the coast or in the deep water are the most promising solution for the development of underwater monitoring, exploration and surveillance applications. A key feature of underwater networks that can significantly enhance current monitoring applications is the ability to accommodate real-time video information on an underwater communication link. In fact, while today monitoring relies on the exchange of simple discrete information, e.g., water temperature, and particle concentration, among others, by introducing real-time streaming capability of non-static images between wireless underwater nodes one can completely revolutionize the whole underwater monitoring scenario. To achieve this goal, underwater links are required to support a sufficiently high data rate, compatible with the streaming rates of the transmitted video sequence. Unfortunately, the intrinsic characteristic of the underwater propagation medium has made this objective extremely challenging. In this paper, we present the first physical layer transmission scheme for short-range and high-data rate ultrasonic underwater communications. The proposed solution, which we will refer to as Underwater UltraSonar (U2S), is based on the idea of transmitting short information-bearing carrierless ultrasonic signals, e.g., pulses, following a pseudo-random adaptive time-hopping pattern with a superimposed rate-adaptive Reed-Solomon forward error correction (FEC) channel coding. We also present the design of the first prototype of a software-defined underwater ultrasonic transceiver that implements U2S PHY transmission scheme through which we evaluate the U2S performance in real-scenario underwater experiments at the PHY layer, i.e., Bit Error Rate (BER) extensively, and at the application layer, i.e., structural similarity (SSIM) index. Results show that U2S links can support point-to-point data rate up to 1.38 Mbps and that by leveraging the flexibility of the adaptive time-hopping and adaptive channel coding techniques, one can trade between link throughput and energy consumption, still satisfying application layer requirements. 
    more » « less