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Wireless Communication for Critical Control

Analysis and Experimental Validation

Time: Fri 2020-05-29 13.15

Location: Zoom (English)

Subject area: Electrical Engineering

Doctoral student: Xiaolin Jiang , Nätverk och systemteknik

Opponent: Professor Preben Mogensen, Aalborg University, Denmark

Supervisor: Carlo Fischione, Nätverk och systemteknik; Zhibo Pang, ABB Corporate Research, Sweden; Ming Xiao, Teknisk informationsvetenskap

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Abstract

Wireless communications are an essential enabler of the Industry 4.0 vision, as they have the potentiality to be deployed in scenarios where the installation of cables is impractical. Nevertheless, the most critical control applications that require ultra low latency and high reliability, are currently only supported by wired communication systems such as Ethernet for Control Automation Technology (EtherCAT) and Process Field Net (PROFINET). In this thesis, we investigate the design of the essential components of a proprietary wireless technology named Wireless High Performance (WirelessHP), which targets to achieve comparable performance to the wired technologies.

In wireless communications, the bottleneck to obtain the desired latency performance lies in the physical layer, where the packet transmission time is too long due to the long overhead and the fixed packet structure that industrial wireless systems have inherited from consumer applications. To address this bottleneck, we propose to considerably reduce the size of the packet preambles while maintaining the preamble’s functions, and we experimentally validate the design by a software defined radio implementation. To further improve the latency performance and guarantee a requested probability of correct packet reception (reliability), we propose a data-driven approach for the wireless channel characterization. This allows us to tune the parameters of the Cyclic Prefix-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing protocol to minimize the packet transmission time under a given reliability requirement. Although the proposed methods are derived for WirelessHP, we also extend and apply them to the physical layer design of 5th generation (5G) New Radio, for which we characterize the reliable minimum delay.

The major contributions of this thesis are the physical layer design of Wireless HP as well as the underlying methodologies that allow us to achieve wireless delay and reliability performance comparable to those offered by EtherCAT and PROFINET technologies. Moreover, the results of the thesis show the potential to influence other wireless communication standards and eventually integrate the advantages of Wireless HP and those standards.

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