Utilization of wireless sensor networks at automated industrial processing plants, not only for monitoring aspects but also for actuator ones, opens a new horizon for their deployment. In this platform, sensing components, control adapters, and actuating entities are the main elements that interact to perform automated industrial processing in an online and sensitive manner. They are connected by a wireless mesh networking platform, a wireless control processing system. In this configuration, information about the environment is transferred by the sensors, appropriate decisions are made by the control section, and the commands are dispatched to the actuators.

Packet loss, which is a common issue in wireless networking, is more critical in the link between the control unit and actuators than between the sensors and the control unit. In the former, the command messages should be transferred at a more timely and reliable manner to perform the appropriate action with a defined accuracy and precision. A joint network routing and control mechanism policy is proposed to mitigate the destructive effects of packet loss.

In the control system, based on the prediction and update mechanisms at the extended Kalman filter (EKF), with the presence of the uncertainties in the communication media, a state observer is used to determine the next most appropriate state, utilizing a model predictive control (MPC) policy. In addition, a buffer in the actuators is placed to store the received control commands and alleviate the possible packet loss effects.

A WirelessHART architecture with physical layer specification IEEE802.15.4 is considered for the network design. The proposed asymmetric routing mechanism is the most significant part of the paper: in response to the different nature of requirements in the network, both source-routing and graph-routing mechanisms are utilized simultaneously for sensor-control and control-actuator links, respectively.

A comprehensive case study in accord with its theoretical discussion is presented, and gained results are demonstrated. The paper definitely has many good and fruitful ideas, but the mutual interaction and influences of the control section and wireless system, somehow, are vague.