College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Term of Award

Spring 2026

Degree Name

Master of Science, Computer Science (M.S.C.S.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Computer Science

Committee Chair

Andrew Allen

Committee Member 1

Ryan Florin

Committee Member 2

Haniph Latchman

Abstract

Distributed industrial control systems often place control and telemetry traffic on the same communication substrate even though the two workloads impose different requirements. Control paths need bounded request-response latency and predictable acknowledgement semantics, whereas telemetry paths benefit from scalable publish-subscribe fanout and tolerance for consumer-side delay. This thesis argues that, for the tested class of mixed workloads on shared commodity infrastructure, these communication roles should be separated architecturally rather than forced through a single protocol. To evaluate that claim, the thesis formalizes an asymmetric control- telemetry pattern and instantiates it in the Asymtra framework using gRPC for synchronous control and MQTT for asynchronous telemetry on a VLAN-segmented Raspberry Pi cluster. Across 108 experimental runs, the asymmetric design maintained the stated control-path service level objective, while the evaluated symmetric designs failed to meet the control-path SLO beyond minimal scale. The contribution is therefore twofold: a formal characterization of a recurring industrial pattern and empirical evidence that, within the tested scope, separation of control and telemetry semantics is required to satisfy divergent service level objectives.

OCLC Number

1592136432

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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