Adaptive Selection of Multiple Paths for Delay-Sensitive Networked Control Systems

In real-time networked control systems, the end-to-end path delays on the communication network should be bounded in order to satisfy the stringent timing constraints of physical system. While the packet delivery on a single path could be significantly affected by network congestion levels, transmitting duplicate packets along multiple paths can overcome fluctuations of the time delay on a specific path by exploiting the diversity of multiple paths. As such, we propose a multi-path selection scheme that selects an appropriate number of multiple paths while minimizing the network traffic overhead due to multiple paths.