Controller and Triggering Mechanism Co-design for Control Over Time-Slotted Networks

This article considers the control of linear time-invariant systems over a time-slotted communication network, which supports infrequent deterministic transmission slots and additional opportunistic transmission slots that can only be used if the network traffic satisfies a desired traffic specification. For two scenarios, controllers as well as combined time-based and event-based triggering mechanisms are designed such that three goals can be jointly achieved. The first goal is to guarantee asymptotic stability by using the deterministic slots, independent of any knowledge about the use of opportunistic transmissions. Second, the triggering mechanisms are designed such that the opportunistic transmissions satisfy a given token bucket traffic specification. As a third goal, the opportunistic transmission decisions should be dependent on the possible performance improvement attributed to the transmitted message. This property is formalized in the newly defined concept of performance-oriented triggering. The two derived controllers and triggering mechanisms are demonstrated using a numerical example.