Packet-Based Communication and Control Co-Design for Networked Control Systems

A packet-based communication and control co-design framework is proposed for Networked Control Systems (NCSs). This framework takes advantage of the characteristic of the packet-based transmission in the networked control environment, which enables a sequence of control signals to be sent over the network simultaneously within one data packet. This consequently makes it possible to actively compensate for the communication constraints in NCSs with specially designed compensation mechanisms, which can not be achieved by conventional control approaches. These compensated communication constraints include all the major ones brought by the communication network to NCSs, i.e., the networkinduced delay, data packet dropout and data packet disorder, thus making the packet-based co-design approach a unified framework for NCSs. Following the design of the packet-based framework, the resulting control system is mathematically formulated, its closed-loop stability is analyzed, and a receding horizon controller is designed to implement the scheme. Finally, the effectiveness of the co-design scheme is verified by numerical examples as well as an Internet-based test rig. It is believed that this packet-based communication and control co-design framework is an important step towards the convergence of control, communication and computation in the new era of the information technology.