Reliability-oriented multipath communication for internet-based cyber-physical systems

The Internet represents a cost-effective solution to realize the communications for Cyber-physical Systems (CPSs) that span large geographical areas. However, the reliability of today's Internet is inadequate to support, for example, smart grid applications with reliability requirements of 99–99.9999%. Therefore, the Reliable Multipath Communication for Internet-based CPSs (RC4CPS) approach was proposed. Unlike previous works, it supports such demanding applications. Nevertheless, it still lacks a protocol implementation to utilize it. Existing multipath protocols for the Internet such as Multipath TCP cannot be utilized directly for such applications. This is due to a number of reasons including the throughput-oriented nature of the protocols. In this paper, RC4CPS is integrated into the Parallel Redundancy Protocol for IP Networks (iPRP) to develop an easy-to-deploy reliability-oriented multipath protocol for Internet-based CPSs. The resulting protocol, called iPRP-RC4CPS, extends the original iPRP implementation to be used in the Internet and provides a dynamic multipath selection to cope with the varying nature of Internet paths. The obtained results show that iPRP-RC4CPS maintained 100% reliability during the evaluation interval.