Management of the Reconfigurable Protocol Stack Based on SDL for Networked Control Systems

This study presented an integrated management framework for the implementation of reconfigurable protocol stack in Networked Control Systems (NCSs). Reconfiguration is a vital capability to cope with protocol heterogeneity and environmental variations and growing attention has been focused on run-time automated management of complex functional entities of communication protocol stacks. Around the discussions on protocol reconfiguration, there is still lacking of a systemic method for NCSs, especially ignoring the performance verification and evaluation for the stack code replacement. Therefore, in this study, a high level modeling language-Specification and Description Language (SDL) was used to formalize the protocol stack. During the reconfiguration procedure, the formal specification was evaluated through running on a set of SDL performance models. And optimization operations would update the inefficient protocol stack till performance constraints are satisfied. Then, a binary coding rule was proposed to construct a design space for exploring reconfiguration parts of the formal protocol specification and generating the protocol configuration file. Besides, the standard ELF (Executable and Linkable Format) file was employed to support the runtime code loading avoiding unexpected linking overheads. The experiment showed that the management framework was efficiency for promoting the reconfiguration capability in communications of NCS with critical real time guaranteed.