Synthesis of Industrial Control Applications for WSNs

The speaker presents a design flow for the design of control-based industrial applications using wireless sensor networks as the underlying communication technology. Following the principles of platform-based design, he identifies the different abstraction layers of a wireless sensor network (WSN). At the application layer, he introduces Rialto, a framework that is able to capture the application functionalities offering an intuitive interface to the end user and generates a set of requirements on the communication infrastructure. These requirements are the beginning of the second stage of our design flow that is represented by Genesis. Genesis takes the requirements coming from Rialto, an abstraction of the hardware platform of the nodes, and an abstraction of the environment, and derives a communication protocol that is able to support the given application and minimises for energy consumption. Finally, once the communication and sensing infrastructure is complete, the functionalities of the application are mapped into the network architecture. The speaker uses an industrial monitoring case study that shows how the methodology covers all the aspects of the design process, from conceptual description to implementation.