GALLOP: toward high-performance connectivity for closing control loops over multi-hop wireless networks

Various legacy and emerging industrial applications require closed-loop control over multiple hops. Existing multi-hop wireless technologies do not completely fulfill the stringent requirements of closed-loop control. This paper proposes a novel wireless solution, termed as GALLOP, for closed-loop control over multi-hop networks. GALLOP adopts a pragmatic approach for tackling the peculiarities of closed-loop control. Key aspects of GALLOP design include control-aware multi-hop scheduling for cyclic information exchange with very low and deterministic latency, cooperative transmissions for very high reliability and low-overhead signaling mechanism for scalable operation in large-scale networks. GALLOP has been specifically designed for control loops closed over the whole multi-hop network with dynamics on the order of few milliseconds. Performance evaluation through hardware implementation on a Bluetooth 5 testbed and system-level simulations demonstrate the viability of GALLOP in providing high-performance connectivity as required by closed-loop control applications.