Co-simulation of Wireless Networked Control Systems over Mobile Ad-hoc Network using SIMULINK and OPNET

Wireless Networked Control Systems (WNCS) over Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a new area of research and has many potential applications, for instance, military or rescue missions, exploring hazardous environments etc. For performance evaluation, researchers mostly rely on computer simulations as WNCS experiments are expensive to execute. It will generate a significant benefit to conduct performance analysis of WNCS over MANET using co-simulation that utilises SIMULINK and OPNET to simulate plant/controller behaviour and the MANET respectively. Previous conference papers by the authors reported the initial SIMULINK-OPNET co-simulation for only one network size. This paper extends our previous works and presents the SIMULINK-OPNET co-simulation, methodology and comprehensive simulation results which have not been reported previously. It also considers the impact of five network sizes with stationary and mobile nodes. The proposed SIMULINK-OPNET co-simulation is applied to WNCS over MANET using a realistic wireless communication model. It investigates the impact of network data rates, node mobility, the packet delay, packet drop on the system stability and performance.