Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator, April 26th, 2011

Banarsidas Chandiwala Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi

Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator

Akhilesh Tharakan
MCA 2nd Semester, BCIIT,
akhilesh.tharakan@gmail.com
1. ABSTRACT on different computer nodes linked by a network aim
This paper has a look into the aspect of Co- to overcome the disadvantages of conventional
simulation framework for Networked Control System digital control systems, such as difficulty of
(NCS). It describes about the working of the modification, vulnerability to electrical noise,
Networked Control System and the most suitable difficulty in maintenance and upgrades, at the
simulation for it. The OMNeT++ Co-simulation application level. Therefore using NCSs has many
techniques are explained so that the right technique advantages over the traditional control systems, such
can we derived by the analysis. as reduced system wiring, simple installation,
increased system flexibility, and the great benefits
1.1 KEYWORDS from sharing of the resources. Therefore, NCSs have
Performance, OMNeT++, Networked Controlled been finding many application areas such as DC
System (NCS), Co-simulation. motors, robots, vehicles, car suspension system, ball
maglev system, etc. However a data delay and loss
2. INTRODUCTION on the network may jeopardize stability.
Major advancements over the last decades in wired As Networked Control System (NCS) have grown
and wireless communication networks gave rise to more and more in both aspects of usability and
the new paradigm of Networked Control Systems complexity, a more refined and logical approach is
(NCS). Within this paradigm, sensing and actuation required for performing the simulation activities.
signals are exchanged among various parts of a Certain control system simulators, like the
single system or among many subsystems via Matlab/Simulink, focuses on continuous dynamics
communication networks. having only some support for distinct events.
System-1 Whereas other network simulators like the OMNeT+
System-3 + and ns-2 provides realistic framework for discrete
event driven simulations and also provides support
Network for a wide range of protocols and scenarios. But
unlike the later mentioned network simulators the
OMNeT++ and ns-2 have a limited support for the
System-N
continuous dynamics which was very easily
System-2
supported by the simulators like the Matlab.
Figure 1: Networked Control System
Therefore to solve the problem of an incomplete
Although this enables one to perform more complex simulation technique for a networked control system
tasks than traditional control paradigms, it comes at we introduced our self to the existing solution known
the cost of complicating the design phase and the as the Hybrid Dynamical System. The hybrid
required analysis tools. dynamics system combined the continuous-time
plant dynamics of control system simulators and also
3. THE NETWORKED CONTROL SYSTEM the discrete events present in network simulators.
BASICS But the hybrid dynamical system posed several
Networked control systems where the sensors, problems as they had high levels of abstraction
controller and actuators of a digital controller reside which sees them either unsuitable, or requires large
 Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator

modeling effort in order to make a realistic NCS complicated. We come across a

simulation feasible. Thus there was a requirement computational bottleneck.
for a controlled network simulator which has led to
the introduction of co-simulation approach. The co- • The plant may be physically large, meaning
simulation approach is one that has both the that signals need to travel long distances to
simulation environment of the controlled and the the control computer causing noise.
network. Thus it provides a combination of all the
• Long connections mean difficulty in
advantages of both the simulators, i.e., preserve the
maintenance and troubleshooting.
computational flexibility of Matlab, OMNet++ and
alongside provide the functionality of a tested and • The control system is not flexible; adding
verified network simulator. new sensors, actuators to the system and
changing the control algorithm would be
Co-simulation is the act of simulating the continuous major tasks.
and discrete dynamics of the control system
As a remedy, networked control systems can be
simultaneously with the discrete events of the
used. The idea is to design sensor that would
computer network. The co-simulation results can be
measures a physical quantity and converts it into a
used to improve and educate the decision-making
signal which would be read by a sensing instrument,
process of system design for both the control system
control and actuator that would serve as a
and the computer network. Thus it would lead to
mechanism for moving and controlling the system.
discovering new tools and to understand and
The same process as explained above is repeated,
improve the performance of NCS.
except data travels from sensor to control and control
to actuator through a communication network
4. HOW DOES IT WORK instead of dedicated connections.
In conventional digital control systems, there are two
major components, the controlled plant and the
controller. Outputs of the plant are sampled at
periodic intervals by the controller, a control
algorithm applied to the samples, and the result of
the control is produced at the output of the controller
generally as a zero order hold signal.

Sensors Control Actuators

Plant

Figure 2: Conventional Control System

Controller Node
From the theoretical point of view, there is no
Controller Node
problem in this approach. From the implementation Figure 3: NCS
point, several aspects can be improved:
Network
• This structure depends on a single computer This way, the control system becomes more flexible.
to calculate the control algorithm. Depending Network
It can be implemented strictly in the conventional
on the complexity of the plant, it may be too layout, or have different layouts as show in the
figure above where several sensors, controllers and

Sensor Node Actuator Node

Sensor Node Actuator

Figure 5:NCS
3:NCS
4:NCS ControllerNode
Node
 Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator
actuators can be present at the same time. Although
this setup helps solve the above problems, it brings
in problems of its own:
• The communication network brings along
(usually) unpredictable delays
• It also introduces possibility of data loss and
corruption.
• It is not clear how to separate the control
algorithm into parts. Some control systems
are not suitable for such separation.
Network caused delay directly contributes to the
delay in the control loop and contributes towards
instability of the system. Data loss is similar in this
respect.
The major trend in modern industrial and
commercial systems is to integrate computing,
communication, and control into different levels of
machine/factory operations. The traditional
communication architecture for control systems is
point-to-point, that is, a wire connects the central
control computer with each sensor or actuator point.
This change to common-bus introduced different
forms of time delay uncertainty between sensors,
actuators, and controllers.
Figure 1: Networked Control System [13]
The NCSs mainly focuses on the study of the
following three components:
1) Network Systems
2) Networked Devices
3) Control Systems
4.1. Control networks
The main components of a control network are;
firstly, the network architecture, it gives the sensors,
actuators and controllers to be well connected to
each other by reducing the cost of wiring and
maintenance. The last two components are the
network protocols and the network performance
analysis. The performance metrics of network
systems looks into the access delay, transmission
time, response time, message delay, message
collisions, message throughput and packet size.
4.2. Networked devices
Network devices are components used to connect
computers or other electronic devices together so
that they can share files or resources. Smart sensors,
smart actuators and networked controller are all
considered as networked devices.
4.3. Control systems
Networked Control System guarantees the stability
and the performance to meets the control system
specifications. The limit in the network bandwidth
introduces to an unavoidable time delays in a control
system. These time delays degrade and make the
system unstable. The Modern control applications
have various industrial plants and sophisticated
control systems. But the modern system also has
several problems in it due to the hardware and
software constraints such as poor reliability, inability
to support advanced control schema and poor
performance. To solve this problem a distribution
mechanism was used where in each node was
dedicated to take care of a single control system and
group them to several other sensors and actuators.
These physical nodes, actuators and sensor interacted
with each other by using the bus network topology.
4.4. Networked control systems design
considerations
Scheduling message and sampling time assignment
for different control systems interconnected by one
 Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator
common-bus network where the main design
consideration of a networked control system. The
sampling period of a control loop was determined by
the number of loop delays and the network
bandwidth, so that it could meet the conditions for
stability and schedule. Thus to ease this multi-hop
topology were used, where additional hardware and
software was introduced to implement the message
transmission. The use of multi hop topology lead to
an increase in the overall system cost.
4.5 Time-delay systems
Delays occur in the transmission of signals or
materials between different subsystems. The
networked control system is based on the time delay
system. The system can be a large-scale system such
as communication systems, manufacturing systems
and transportation systems, The two main
approaches used to analyze the stability of time-
delay systems are: classical (frequency domain) and
functional (time domain) approaches.
5. NETWORKED SIMULATOR
A network simulator is a software program that
imitates the working of a computer network. In
simulators, the computer network is typically
modeled with devices, traffic and the performance is
analyzed. Typically, users can then customize the
simulator to fulfill their specific analysis needs.
Simulators typically come with support for the most
popular protocols in use today, such as WLAN, Wi-
Max, UDP, and TCP [14].
5.1 SIMULATIONS
The imitation of some real thing, state of affairs, or
processing a certain network condition is known as
simulation. Most of simulators available are GUI
based while others are scripts or commands based.
The various parameters of a network describe the
state of the network like the node placement,
existing links and the events such as data
transmissions, link failures. The simulator provides
an output in the form of files known as trace files.
Trace files document every event that occurred in
the simulation. These files are further used for
analysis of the network. The network simulators
have other tools that keep the key facts fro the data
to provide the result so as to find the best case,
average case and the worst case. The simulation is
done on event bases where the events are triggered in
sequence order.
5.2 USES OF NETWORKED SIMULATORS
The Network simulators serve as a great tool for cost
cutting and time involved by the user to in setting up
an entire test bed containing multiple networked
computers, routers and other data links very quickly.
Simulation give the engineers, researchers the
opportunity to test scenarios that might be difficult
or expensive to implement using real hardware
Network simulators help provide new networking
protocols or changes to existing protocols without
creating any harm in the society or causing any extra
cost. A typical network simulator encompasses a
wide range of networking technologies and can help
the users to build complex networks from basic
building blocks such as a variety of nodes and links.
With the help of simulators, one can design
hierarchical networks using various types of nodes
like computers, hubs, bridges, routers, switches,
links, mobile units etc. There are a wide variety of
network simulators, ranging from the very simple to
the very complex. The network simulator enable’s a
user to represent a network topology, specifying the
nodes on the network, the links between those nodes
and the traffic between the nodes. The graphical
applications in the networked simulator allow the
users to easily visualize the workings of their
simulated environment.
6. SIMULATION TOOLS: OMNeT++
OMNeT++ stands for Objective Modular Network
Testbed in C++. It is a discrete event simulation tool
designed to simulate computer networks, multi-
processors and other distributed systems. Its
applications can be extended for modeling other
systems as well. It has become a popular network
simulation tool in the scientific community as well
as in industry over the years.
6.1 THE DESIGN OF OMNeT++
 Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator
OMNeT++ was designed to support network
simulation on a large scale. The OMNeT++ had
various objectives which lead to the main design:
• To enable large-scale simulation, simulation
models need to be hierarchical, and built
from reusable components as much as
possible.
• The simulation software should facilitate
visualizing and debugging of simulation
models in order to reduce debugging time,
which traditionally takes up a large
percentage of simulation projects.
• The simulation software should be
customizable and should allow embedding
simulations into larger applications such as
network planning software.
• Should provide an Integrated Development
Environment that largely facilitates model
development and analyzing results.
6.2. Contents of the Simulation Library
The OMNeT++ simulation has various class library.
The classes were designed to cover most of the
common simulation tasks. It has the ability to
generate random numbers from several independent
streams. The class library offers queues and various
other container classes. Queues are operated as
priority queues. OMNeT++ supports routing traffic
in the network. Thus has the ability to explore actual
network topology, by using graph data structure and
other algorithms to find the shortest path.
The experiments are executed as a whole or partial
in a single batch. After specifying the model and the
experiment parameters one can further refine which
measurements one is interested in. The simulation
batch can be executed and its progress monitored
from the IDE.
6.3 Result Analysis
Analyzing the simulation result is a lengthy and time
consuming process. In most cases the user wants to
see the same type of data for each run of the
simulation or display the same graphs for different
modules in the model, so automation is very
important. The lack of automation support drives
many users away from existing GUI analysis tools,
and forces them to write scripts. OMNeT++ solves
the problem that many user face have of writing
script, it was removed by making result analysis
rule-based. Simulations and series of simulations
produce various result files.
Figure 2:OMNeT++ GUI
7. CONCLUSION
This paper is to offer a general overview on what is a
networked computer system and there working. The
various components of a networked computer system
and its difference from the conventional system have
been highlighted. After that an introduction to the
aspect of simulation has be done wherein the
simulation process and the various way to perform a
simulation using the available simulator has been
explained. At the end an overview of OMNeT++
simulator has been taken up. The working and the
functionality of OMNeT++ has been explained so as
to get a basic idea of the OMNeT++ Simulator.
8. FUTURE SCOPE
According to the various advancement in the field of
networking it would be great to have or develop
more system that would help make networking a
much easier process. The variety of simulators
would make it very easy and understand for us to
implement and test the upcoming networked system
without paying the cost of physically implementing
the setup in a real world. Thus the NCS and the
various simulators would help in attaining a much
more well connected world ahead.
 Comparative study of Networked Control System and OMNeT++ Simulator

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