Application-level operations latency control in networked WSAN

Abstract

The utilization of wireless sensor networks in industrial environments poses issues related to performance control. We consider a networked system composed of multiple wireless sensor networks (WSN) that are plugged into a cabled Networked Control System (NCS) made of middleware computers and control stations. The challenge that we faced was to provide predictable end-to-end latency expectations in those settings, as opposed to the problem of predicting latencies within a WSN only. We consider a deployment with multiple small-sized schedule-based WSN sub-networks and the NCS. The approach accounts for details such as de-synch issues that are to be expected in the heterogeneous context. Experimental results show actual latencies and confront them with predictions in a testbed deployment. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.