WNCS 2011 - WNCS 2011 : First International Workshop on Wireless Networked Control Systems

WSNs have been widely used because of flexibility, lower costs and scalability that they have been shown to provide. The pace of application in the context of wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) has been significantly impeded, however, by the reluctance of industry to make the accommodations necessary to allow wireless paths to be incorporated in process control loops. Many sensors in a modern industrial plant are used for closed-loop control, so the numerous potential WSN applications that exist in the process and manufacturing industries make this impediment extremely serious. One problem is that there are conflicts between maintaining control loop performance on one hand, which can be degraded by many WSN issues, such as delays in wireless paths (latency), low data rates, irregular arrival of data (jitter) and electromagnetic interference; and meeting the usual objectives in managing a WSN, namely freedom to configure the network and to adjust data rates at will, to maximize efficiency and to conserve energy consumption in the network nodes.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to present their work and participate in dialog. We expect the workshop to act as a leading forum for the WSN research community to discuss their ideas on addressing the most current challenges, potential solutions and future developments of WNCSs.