A wireless networked control systems (NCS) is a control system whose feedback path is realized over a wireless communication network. The stability of such systems can be problematic given the random way in which wireless channels drop feedback messages. This paper establishes sufficient conditions for the almost sure stability of NCS under random dropouts. These conditions relate the burstiness in the dropout process to the nominal response of the controlled system. In particular, this means that the burstiness of the dropout process provides a convenient quality-of-service (QoS) constraint on the wireless channel that can be used to adaptively reconfigure the control system in a manner that guarantees the almost sure stability of the NCS. We also show how a probabilistic extension of the network calculus can be used to reconfigure multi-hop communication networks so that this paper’s sufficient stability condition is not violated. Keywords Wireless, Networked Control Systems, al...
Michael D. Lemmon, Xiaobo Sharon Hu