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This paper describes the motivation, design, analysis and configuration of the criticality-aware multi-hop wireless communication protocol AirTight. Wireless communication has become a crucial part of the infrastructure of many cyber-physical applications. Many of these applications are real-time and also mixed-criticality, in that they have components/subsystems with different consequences of failure. Wireless communication is inevitably subject to levels of external interference. In this paper we represent this interference using a criticality-aware fault model; for each level of temporal interference in the fault model we guarantee the timing behaviour of the protocol (i.e.~we guarantee that packet deadlines are satisfied for certain levels of criticality). Although a new protocol, AirTight is built upon existing standards such as IEEE 802.15.4. A prototype implementation and protocol-accurate simulator have been produced. This paper develops a series of schedulability analysis techniques for single-channel and multichannel wireless Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Heuristics are specified and evaluated as the starting point of design space exploration. Genetic algorithms are then defined and evaluated to assess their performance in developing schedule tables incorporating multichannel allocations in these systems.

Simulation can be considered a necessary evil in the validation of systems, especially when the system under consideration is being prototyped and therefore does not presently exist. This is compounded by the use of high level simulators; on the one hand, high level simulation is efficient, in that it abstracts away many details of the system which are deemed to be not important. This allows for a simpler and faster running simulator, which allows the user to obtain results faster and/or perform more experiments. On the other hand, some of the details abstracted away might turn out to be important, introducing inaccuracies. This paper outlines a framework for the statistical understanding and attribution of the errors produced by a high level simulator when compared against real experiments by means of a low level simulator. This allows the user of a simulator to determine whether or not the inaccuracies are significant, and whether or not the high level simulator requires refinements in its accuracy for the results to be valid. These techniques are illustrated via a case study.

The integration of Multi-Processors System-on-Chip (MPSoCs) into the Internet -of -Things (IoT) context brings new opportunities, but also represent risks. Tight real-time constraints and security requirements should be considered simultaneously when designing MPSoCs. Network-on-Chip (NoCs) are specially critical when meeting these two conflicting characteristics. For instance the NoC design has a huge influence in the security of the system. A vital threat to system security are so-called side-channel attacks based on the NoC communication observations. To this end, we propose a NoC security mechanism suitable for hard real-time systems, in which schedulability is a vital design requirement. We present three contributions. First, we show the impact of the NoC routing in the security of the system. Second, we propose a packet route randomisation mechanism to increase NoC resilience against side-channel attacks. Third, using an evolutionary optimisation approach, we effectively apply route randomisation while controlling its impact on hard real-time performance guarantees. Extensive experimental evidence based on analytical and simulation models supports our findings.

The AirTight protocol supports mixed criticality wireless traffic and temporal guarantees based on defined fault models. In some systems, following a catastrophic failure, it is necessary to communicate crucial data away from the site of the failure in order to better understand (post-hoc) the reasons why it occurred. To support this action it is necessary for a mode change request to be propagated to all the non-failed nodes in the system, and for these nodes to switch their behaviour so that the crucial data is given high priority in its use of the wireless network. This paper explains how Airtight can support such a critical mode change. A uni-cast protocol is utilised to flood the system with mode change messages, each node then locally prioritizes its use of the available bandwidth to support the defined UC (Ultra-Criticality) packet flows. An aircraft engine control scenario is used to motivate the requirements for the mode change protocol. Protocol-accurate simulations are then used to illustrate and evaluate the approach.