Energy efficient robust scheduling of periodic sensor packets for discrete rate based wireless networked control systems

Abstract

Wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) require the design of a robust scheduling algorithm that meets the stringent timing and reliability requirements of control systems, despite the limited battery resources of sensor nodes and adverse properties of wireless communication for delay and packet errors. In this article, we propose a robust delay and energy constrained scheduling algorithm based on the exploitation of the mostly pre-known periodic data generation nature of sensor nodes in control systems. We first formulate the joint optimization of scheduling, power control and rate adaptation for discrete rate transmission model, in which only a finite set of transmission rates are supported, as a Mixed-Integer Non-linear Programming problem and prove its NP-hardness. Next, we propose an optimal polynomial-time power control and rate adaptation algorithm for minimizing the transmission time of a node subset. We then design a novel polynomial-time heuristic scheduling algorithm based on first determining the concurrently transmitting node subsets and then distributing them uniformly over time by a modified Karmarkar-Karp algorithm. We demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed scheduling algorithm in terms of robustness, delay and runtime on the Low-Rate Wireless Personal Area Network (LR-WPAN) simulation platform, which we developed in network simulator-3 (ns3).