Research Preparation Exam:  Quan Leng

Title:  RT-WiFi: Real-Time High Speed Communication Protocol for Wireless Control Systems
Date: July 8, 2013.
Time: 4pm - 5pm
Place: GDC 6.516
Committee members: Simon S. Lam, Raymond J. Mooney,  Aloysius K. Mok(Chair)

Abstract:
In this talk, we present our design and implementation of a real-time high-speed wireless communication protocol called RT-WiFi. RT-WiFi is designed to be used in sensing and control systems to enhance the system mobility and reduce the deployment and maintenance cost. Existing wireless technologies either cannot provide real-time guarantee on packet delivery or are not fast enough to support high-speed control systems, which typically require 1KHz or higher sampling rate. Nondeterministic packet transmission and insufficiently high sampling rate will severely hurt the control performance. RT-WiFi is a TDMA data link layer protocol based on 802.11 physical layer to provide deterministic timing guarantee on packet delivery and high sampling rate up to 6KHz. It incorporates configurable components for adjusting design trade-off in terms of sampling rate, latency variance, reliability, and compatibility to existing Wi-Fi network, thus can serve as a communication platform for supporting a wide range of high speed wireless sensing and control systems. We implemented RT-WiFi on commercial-off-the-shelf hardware. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RT-WiFi in providing deterministic packet delivery in both data link layer and application layer, which further eases the controller design and improves the control performance.