YiFei Wang, Qizhi Pei, Jiangtao Feng, Yuntian Shi, Yi Duan, Lihao Wang, Lei Bai, Lijun Wu, Wei-Ying Ma, Hao Zhou. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

The integration of EtherCAT and TSN has been proposed to enhance performance of EtherCAT networks in industrial automation. EtherCAT over TSN transforms a traditional EtherCAT ring into multiple shorter rings interconnected via TSN switches, enabling concurrent data transmission across segments and reducing cycle time. However, the use of multiple segments introduces contention for the master in the return path, potentially leading to scheduling failures and an increase in cycle time. We study the impact of network topology, i.e., the number of segments and slave node distribution, on schedulability, and formulate the topology optimization problem for the converged network based on schedulability analysis. We evaluate our methodology and optimal solution using SMT and Integer Programming (LIP) solvers, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and our solution outperforms baselines.

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), asynchronous duty-cycle technique can significantly reduce energy consumption. However, packets in low-duty-cycle networks suffer high end-to-end (E2E) delay. Besides, recent experimental studies have also shown that links in WSNs are highly unreliable and radio irregularity has adverse impact on routing protocols. In this work, we introduce a dynamic data forwarding (DDF) scheme which combines a realistic link model with asynchronous duty cycle. Different from most of other routing protocols, each node in our solution first finds out a set of candidate nodes and then forwards packet to the first waking up node in this set. Our solution can reduce E2E delay, guarantee delivery ratio and improve network lifetime. We evaluate this dynamic data forwarding scheme with extensive simulations and the simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of our solution.

A research topic that is becoming increasingly popular is that of on-board mobile communication, where users on a vehicle are connected to a local network that attaches to the Internet via a mobile router and a wireless link. However, wireless data transmission is less efficient, prone to error and unreliable in a mobile environment. There is a need to make use of multiple access links simultaneously (so-called multihoming), to improve the aggregate bandwidth and the overall service availability on a mobile network. In this paper, we introduce a novel on-board multihoming agent for supporting the future on-board multihomed mobile routers. The multihoming agent can intelligently stripe user traffics into multiple active WAN interfaces based on the policy in use and the real-time network status and automatically shift user traffics from unavailable links to available ones. We show that by properly deploying the policies defined in the policy database and continuously collecting network status, a user can run intelligent load distribution algorithms on top of the mobile router to improve network performance and reliability via our multihoming agent

In order to enhance the flexibility of the workflow management, many researchers put their focus on the flexible workflow management system. After discussing the features of flexible workflow, we propose a method to specify the flexible workflow by temporal logic based workflow specification model. Using this model, we have designed a flexible workflow management system. The flexibility for both selection and adaptation is supported well in this system. This paper describes how the flexibility is supported in the flexible workflow management system. A prototype system has been developed based on our model.