Improving Reliability and Sustainability of Hazard-Aware Cyber-Physical Systems

The network system deployed in hazardous environments is a key component of hazard-aware cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and its performance highly depends on surrounding environments. Due to the mobility of network nodes (e.g., portable IoT devices), frequently changeable network topology and links, as well as other external interferences such as electromagnetic interference, ensuring adaptivity and reliability of hazard-aware CPSs is of utmost importance. Meanwhile, the timeliness of message transmission is stringent in hazardous environments because the violation of timing requirements may lead to serious consequences. Last but not least, portable IoT devices are typically energy limited, thus ensuring a sustainable message transmission is highly necessary. In this paper, we aim at optimizing the reliability of hazard-aware CPSs while meeting the timing and energy constraints. To this end, we develop the first hazard-aware CPS model and study the impacts of surrounding environments (i.e., physical side) to the network infrastructure of a hazard-aware CPS (i.e., cyber side) with respect to reliability. We also propose a new scheme that adaptively tunes the fault tolerance strategies and admission strategies for real-time messages, to increase the reliability of hazard-aware CPSs under the energy constraint. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme is capable of increasing system reliability by up to 4.21× with a lower deadline miss rate and runtime overhead compared with the state-of-the-art approaches.