REFLEXES: A Co-Designed Architecture for In-Network Control

Recent technological developments in sensing, communication, control and computation have fostered an emerging class of complex applications, called Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). In these networks, a process is no longer bound to a specific independent device, but coordinated between several interdependent network nodes; and therefore distributed via a communication network. CPS are making inroads into an ever increasing number of application domains such as industrial automation (Industry 4.0), energy, transport, and health care systems. The deployment of CPS promises considerable benefits, including increased flexibility, efficiency, and adaptability.

However, the traditional separate and layered design of communication and control architecture prevents the ubiquitous adoption of CPS as the communication-induced unreliability and latency compromises the quality-of-control and may even lead to dangerous behavior. The core concept of the project has an analogy in nature: Within the human body reflexes are fast pre-defined simple action patterns, which are located in the spinal cord, i.e. close (in the sense of low transmission latency) to the sensors and actuators. Higher-level planning and control mechanisms are located farther away in the brain.

Therefore, the goal of this project is to develop a novel co-designed architecture for communication and control to facilitate the best possible performance of CPS given the available communication and computation resources. We introduce the novel paradigm of in-network control, which pushes control functionalities as close as possible to the process to be controlled exploiting the computational power of active network components - even if limited. We will move away from the ‘traditional’ layered communication architecture and deploy in-network processing of simple control commands bypassing the classical protocol stack. In short, the general objective of this project is to reduce the communication distance of control messages as much as possible (horizontally, in the number of hops, and vertically, in the time for processing) and to increase reliability by introducing deterministic processing of such messages. As a result unnecessary time delays and unreliability within the closed control loop are avoided leading to the best possible quality-of- control. The key methodical contributions of this project are i) a novel approach to distribute the control on a given communication and computation infrastructure including appropriate analysis tools for performance evaluation, ii) a novel software framework for in-network processing with real-time constraints by co-designing the execution of control and communication procedures in a single and fundamentally new methodology.

In this project, we at COMSYS work closely with our project partners at the Chair of Information-oriented Control at TU Munich.



Publications

Harnessing Cooperative Anycast Communication for Increased Resilience in Wireless Control. Proceedings of the 61st IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC 2022), Dec 6 - Dec 9, 2022, Cancun, Mexico. December 2022.
Service-based Forwarding via Programmable Dataplanes. Proceedings of the 2021 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing: Workshop on Semantic Addressing and Routing for Future Networks (SARNET-21), Paris, France, co-located with the 22nd IEEE International Conference on High Performance Switching and Routing (HSPR '21). June 2021.
Investigating the Applicability of In-Network Computing to Industrial Scenarios. Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems. Presented at the 2021 4th IEEE International Conference on Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems (ICPS '21), May 10 - May 12, 2021, Victoria, BC, Canada. May 2021.
Improving MAC Protocols for Wireless Industrial Networks via Packet Prioritization and Cooperation. International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks: Workshop on Communication, Computing, and Networking in Cyber Physical Systems (CCNCPS ‘20), Cork, Ireland, co-located with the 21st IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WoWMoM '20). August 2020.
Perceiving QUIC: Do Users Notice or Even Care?. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT ‘19), Dec 9 - Dec 12, 2019, Orlando, Florida, USA. December 2019.
Towards Executing Computer Vision Functionality on Programmable Network Devices. Proceedings of the 1st ACM CoNEXT Workshop on Emerging in-Network Computing Paradigms (ENCP ‘19), Dec 9, 2019, Orlando, FL, United States. December 2019.
A Performance Perspective on Web Optimized Protocol Stacks: TCP+TLS+HTTP/2 vs. QUIC. Proceedings of the Applied Networking Research Workshop (ANRW ‘19), Jul 22, 2019, Montreal, Quebec, Canada. July 2019.
Demystifying the Performance of XDP BPF. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization. Presented at the 2019 IEEE Conference on Network Softwarization (NetSoft '19), Jun 24 - Jun 28, 2019, Paris, France. June 2019.
Enabling Wireless Network Support for Gain Scheduled Control. Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Edge Systems, Analytics and Networking (EdgeSys 2019), Mar 25, 2019, Dresden, Germany. March 2019.
A Case for Integrated Data Processing in Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems. Proceedings of the 52nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Jan 8 - Jan 11, 2019, USA. January 2019.
Application-Agnostic Offloading of Datagram Processing. Proceedings of the 2018 30th International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 30), Sep 3 - Sep 7, 2018, Vienna, Austria. September 2018.
Towards In-Network Industrial Feedback Control. Proceedings of the 2018 Morning Workshop on In-Network Computing (NetCompute ‘18), Aug 20, 2018, Budapest, Hungary, co-located with the ACM SIGCOMM 2018 Conference (SIGCOMM '18). August 2018.
Demo: Towards In-Network Processing for Low-Latency Industrial Control. Proceedings of the 2018 IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops, Apr 15 - Apr 19, 2018, Honolulu, HI, USA. April 2018.
Towards Benchmark Optimization by Automated Equivalence Detection. Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Benchmarking Cyber-Physical Networks and Systems (CPSBench'18), Apr 10, 2018, Porto, Portugal. April 2018.
A First Look at QUIC in the Wild. Passive and Active Measurement. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10771. Presented at the 19th Annual Passive and Active Measurement Conference (PAM '18), Mar 26 - Mar 27, 2018, Berlin, Germany. March 2018.
SymPerf: Predicting Network Function Performance. Proceedings of the 2017 SIGCOMM Posters and Demos. Presented at the ACM SIGCOMM 2017 Conference (SIGCOMM '17), Aug 22 - Aug 24, 2017, Los Angeles, CA, United States. August 2017.