Abstract: Wireless sensor/actuator networks (WSANs) are emerging as a new generation

of sensor networks. Serving as the backbone of control applications, WSANs will enable
an unprecedented degree of distributed and mobile control. However, the unreliability of
wireless communications and the real-time requirements of control applications raise great
challenges for WSAN design. With emphasis on the reliability issue, this chapter presents an
application-level design methodology for WSANs in mobile control applications and including
the transition from the analog world into its digital counterpart and from centralized wired
solutions to distributed and pervasive wireless systems. In particular, the advent of lowcost and
low-power transceivers, together with the development of compact-size and open standard
stacks, have made possible Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), largely adopted for both
home/office and industrial monitoring applications. The “Internet of Things” (IoT), i.e. the
capability of connecting every possible device to the World Wide Web, is the practical answer
to this request. The very large amount of information that is consequently generated could be
profitably handled using “cloud” services, i.e. flexible and powerful hardware/software
frameworks capable to deliver computing as a service. The
solution is generic in that it is independent of the underlying platforms, environment,
control system models, and controller design. To capture the link quality characteristics in
terms of packet loss rate, experiments are conducted on a real WSAN system. From the
experimental observations, a simple yet efficient method is proposed to deal with
unpredictable packet loss on actuator nodes and is to resume pros and cons of well-accepted
WSN technologies, suggesting their possible extension towards already available cloud
services.

Keywords: wireless sensor/actuator network, sensor network, control application, link

quality, packet loss.