  Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging as a new generation of
sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will
enable an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the
unreliability of wireless communications and the real-time requirements of
control applications raise great challenges for WSAN design. With emphasis on
the reliability issue, this paper presents an application-level design
methodology for WSANs in mobile control applications. The solution is generic
in that it is independent of the underlying platforms, environment, control
system models, and controller design. To capture the link quality
characteristics in terms of packet loss rate, experiments are conducted on a
real WSAN system. From the experimental observations, a simple yet efficient
method is proposed to deal with unpredictable packet loss on actuator nodes.
Trace-based simulations give promising results, which demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed approach.
