CS seminar

Title: Adopting LoRa for industrial wireless control

Abstract

There has been a growing interest in adopting low-power wide-area network technology, especially LoRa, for industrial control applications. Its machine-to-machine communication capabilities enable managing large-area applications (e.g., oil fields over hundreds of square kilometers) or process plants often positioned far from the central operations center, at inconvenient or hazardous locations in difficult terrain or offshore. While LoRa has been extensively studied for Internet-of-Things, existing work on LoRa has not considered real-time communication with timing guarantees and optimized control performance for the safe operation of industries. Industrial automation needs a co-design of real-time scheduling and control to optimize control performance. Such a co-design, in general, is highly challenging due to complex dependencies between control performance,  plant dynamics, and real-time communication. This talk will explore techniques for providing real-time communication over LoRa and optimized control performance. To provide timeliness guarantees for LoRa communication, we have developed a real-time MAC protocol called RTPL. On average, RTPL achieves 75% improvement in real-time performance without sacrificing throughput or energy compared to traditional LoRa MAC. To optimize control performance, we have developed a real-time scheduling and control co-design for a LoRa network that dynamically updates the frequency of sampling and communication by considering LoRa characteristics, state of the system, and timing requirements. The dynamic updation of the sampling rate reduces the cost of controlling the plant by at least 80%. By the end of the talk, we will discuss opportunities and directions for adopting LoRa to monitor and control industrial applications.

Bio

Prashant Modekurthy is an assistant professor of computer science at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He received his PhD in computer science from Wayne State University in 2020. His research interests are real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, Internet-of-things, and wireless networks. His work has been recognized with two Best Paper Awards.