End-to-End Delay Analysis for Wireless Control Networks under EDF Scheduling

OF THE THESIS End-to-End Delay Analysis for Wireless Control Networks under EDF Scheduling by Chengjie Wu Master of Science in Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis, August 2013 Research Advisor: Professor Chenyang Lu Process industries are starting to adopt multi-hop and multi-channel wireless control networks (WCNs) for process control applications. To meet the stringent real-time performance requirements of control systems, there is a critical need for fast end-to-end delay analysis to support online admission control of periodic real-time flows. While recent results on delay analysis for WCNs have focused on fixed-priority scheduling, this thesis presents the first end-to-end delay analysis for real-time flows in WCNs that schedule transmissions based on the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) policy, a widely used dynamic scheduling policy in real-time systems. This analysis provides safe end-to-end delay bounds for real-time flows and can be used for efficient admission control at run time. Simulations based on both random topologies and the topology of a wireless testbed demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis for online admission control of real-time flows.