Towards Real-time Wireless Cyber-physical Systems

One big challenge to be overcome before the successful deployment of wireless cyber-physical systems is to provide hard real-time guarantees, not only within the wireless network, but in fact between end-to-end application processes. To achieve this, we design a distributed real-time protocol (DRP) that considers the complete transmission chain, including application tasks, peripheral busses, memory accesses, networking interfaces, and wireless real-time protocol. DRP guarantees that end-to-end message deadlines are met, while being adaptive to unpredictable system changes, by establishing at run-time a set of contracts among the different elements of the transmission chain.