Using Real-Time Logic Synthesis Tool to Achieve Process Control over Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have been a very active research field in the past few years. However, most of extant research has focused on wireless sensing, such as environmental and habitat monitoring. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of applying wireless technologies in industrial real-time process control systems. We define a minimum set of assumptions about the underlying sensor networks in order to achieve real-time support for process control. These assumptions are necessary and practical from an industrial perspective. We formulate the modeling of a wireless process control configuration as a multi-processor scheduling problem. The resulting scheduling problem is solved by the scheduler synthesis tool MSP.RTL to produce a valid configuration for deployment. The deployment, because of the way it is derived, provides real-time wireless support for the controlled processes. Simulation results on data from real plant configurations show that this approach can also drastically reduce potential interferences between wireless transfers