Closing the Loop: A High-Performance Connectivity Solution for Realizing Wireless Closed-Loop Control in Industrial IoT Applications

High-performance real-time wireless connectivity is at the heart of the Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT). Realizing wireless closed-loop control is crucial for various mission-critical IIoT systems. Existing wireless technologies fall short of meeting the stringent performance requirements of closed-loop control. This paper presents a novel wireless solution, called textsfGALLOP, for realizing closed-loop control over multi-hop or single-hop networks. textsfGALLOP adopts a pragmatic design approach for addressing the challenges of wireless closed-loop control. Key design aspects of textsfGALLOP include control-aware bi-directional scheduling for cyclic exchange, robust retransmission techniques based on cooperative multi-user diversity and low-overhead signaling for scalable operation. textsfGALLOP has been specifically designed for control loops that are closed over the whole network with dynamics on the order of few milliseconds. Performance evaluation based on extensive system-level simulations and hardware implementation on a Bluetooth 5 testbed demonstrates that textsfGALLOP provides high-performance connectivity with very low and deterministic latency, very high reliability and high scalability, to meet the stringent requirements of wireless closed-loop control for versatile IIoT applications.