Application level compensation for burst errors in wireless control networks

The use of wireless communications in real-time control applications poses several severe problems related to the comparatively low reliability of the communication channels. This paper is concerned with application-level strategies for ameliorating the effects of packet losses and burst errors in sampled-data control systems implemented via one or more wireless links. In particular, the paper develops an adaptive/predictive compensator that reconstructs the best estimates (in a least squares sense) of a sequence of one or more missing process data packets. An embedded implementation of the proposed technique is applied to a case study, and it is shown that the proposed techniques outperform existing methods in a control system experiencing artificially induced burst errors, whilst also exhibiting acceptably low overheads.