REACT: An agile control plane for industrial wireless sensor-actuator networks

Industrial automation is embracing wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs) as the communication technology for industrial Internet of Things. Due to the strict real-time and reliability constraints imposed by industrial applications, industrial WSAN standards such as WirelessHART employ centralized management to facilitate deterministic communication. However, a centralized management architecture faces significant challenges to adapt to changing wireless conditions. While earlier research on industrial WSANs has primarily focused on improving the performance of the data plane, there has been limited attention on the control plane, which plays a crucial role for sustaining the data plane performance in dynamic environments. This paper presents REACT, a reliable, efficient, and adaptive control plane for industrial WSANs. Specifically optimized for network adaptation, REACT significantly reduces the latency and energy cost of network reconfiguration, thereby improving the agility of WSANs in dynamic environments. REACT comprises (1) a Reconfiguration Planner employing flexible scheduling and routing algorithms and reactive update policies to reduce rescheduling cost, and (2) an Update Engine providing efficient and reliable mechanisms to report link failures and disseminate updated schedules. REACT has been implemented for a WirelessHART protocol stack. Evaluation results based on two testbeds demonstrate that REACT can reduce network reconfiguration latency by 60% at 50% of energy cost when compared to standard approaches.