Integrating Control and Fault-Tolerant Wireless Network Design for Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

There has been an increasing number of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) in the last decade. CPSs sometimes include wireless networks that incur delay and errors. In this paper, we have developed an integrated design approach to combine control system and fault-tolerant wireless network design for an advanced, high-temperature, small, modular nuclear reactor (SMR). Our design approach is composed of two sub-problems: extracting network requirements from control systems and designing networks to meet such requirements. Focused on SMRs, our contributions are as follows: (1) we show how to derive a two-dimensional network performance requirement region in terms of network delay and error; (2) we propose a computation model to determine the network topology to meet network requirements with minimum energy consumption; (3) we conduct a case study with 12-hop and up to 78 nodes wireless sensor network to control a heat exchanger system in an SMR. The average difference between computation model results and simulation results is 4.1%, which confirms our computation model is accurate enough for such systems.