On the Value of Separation of Control and Data in a Distributed Meteorological Sensing Network
Résumé
In this work, we investigate the value of separate handling
of control and data traffic in a networked sense-and-response
application. Our results show that while the separate handling
of control and data does indeed result in a decrease in the
round-trip control-loop delay, and a consequent increase in the
number ofdata samples examined during each pass through the
system’s control loop, the gain in sensing accuracy is relatively
small, except at very high loads; we find a similar result for the
performance of the meteorological tracking application. We
show, however, that because sensing accuracy both improves
and degrades slowly in the number of sensed values obtained,
the system is robust in that it can still perform well in the case
of severe overload, but only in the case that control messages
receive priority and remain unaffected by data overload.