Reliable FPGA-based Camera Sensor for NCS

Networked Control Systems (NCSs) form an interesting architecture for industrial applications. They are composed of smart sensors, actuators and controllers. Also, FPGAs have recently been progressively used in industry. One of the main advantages of FPGAs is the feature of Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration (DPR) which is used to repair some failures without interrupting system operation. This paper combined both NCS and FPGAs in a new architecture that has several advantages. First, it includes an image storing capability which is very important in certain applications. Second, the architecture has several fault-tolerant features in order to prolong system lifetime. Third, even in the case of failure, raw video is never sent over the network. A case study is presented to quantify the increase in reliability of the presented system. Markov models were developed and the SHARPE package was used to compare the reliability of the proposed system to that of a comparable system in the literature; the results indicate that the proposed system is more reliable.