A Simple Approach to Increase the Maximum Allowable Transmission Interval

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple modification to existing emulation-based methods for computing the maximum allowable transmission interval in networked control systems, significantly improving the bounds and ensuring stability.

Contribution

It proposes a minor but effective modification to the emulation approach that substantially enhances the MATI bounds for nonlinear NCS.

Findings

MATI bounds can be improved by over 100% with the proposed method

The approach is applicable to general nonlinear NCS

Numerical examples demonstrate significant improvements

Abstract

When designing Networked Control Systems (NCS), the maximum allowable transmission interval (MATI) is an important quantity, as it provides the admissible time between two transmission instants. An efficient procedure to compute a bound on the MATI such that stability can be guaranteed for general nonlinear NCS is the emulation of a continuous-time controller. In this paper, we present a simple but efficient modification to the well-established emulation-based approach from Carnevale et al. (2007) to derive a bound on the MATI. Whilst only minor technical changes are required, the proposed modification can lead to significant improvements for the MATI bound as compared to Carnevale et al. (2007). We revisit two numerical examples from literature and demonstrate that the improvement may amount to more than 100%.