QoS-Assured In-Network Processing in Wireless Cyber-Physical Systems: A Survey

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are expected to transform how people interact with and manipulate the physical world and thus have farreaching impact on science and engineering. In many CPS such as next-generation vehicle networks, communication via wireless sensor and actuator networks is not only the approach to send or collect data, but also the basis of the adaptive control in the whole system. These systems are called wireless cyber-physical systems (WCPS). Different from traditional wireless sensor networks (WSN) and wireless networks, WCPS emphasize the use of system output as feedback to control system behaviors, which implies that Quality of Services (QoS) has great impact on the design of WCPS. Over the past decades In-Network Processing (INP) protocols in WSN and wireless networks have been extensively studied in order to minimize the energy consumption of nodes. In WCPS, INP will continue to play an important role in communication protocol design due to its advantages. Nonetheless, there has not been a deep study on how to provide different QoS guarantees to users under different INP techniques in WCPS, e.g., real-time and reliability guarantee. This paper comprehensively surveys on current research about different INP protocols and the QoS control in INP protocols. Some open issues are also discussed in this paper. The goal of this paper is not only to introduce different INP protocols and QoS control in INP, but also to provide guidelines for future studies on the joint optimization of INP and QoS in WCPS.