Effect of Computational Power of Sensors on Event-Triggered Control Mechanisms over a Shared Contention-Based Network

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the computational power of sensors influences distributed channel triggering mechanisms in wireless networked control systems, comparing conventional and smart sensors using information-theoretic measures.

Contribution

It introduces a novel priority measure based on the value of information for smart sensors, enhancing event-triggered control over shared networks.

Findings

Smart sensors benefit from using the value of information measure.

Conventional sensors rely on statistical properties of observations for triggering.

Simulation results compare different priority measures in simple scenarios.

Abstract

In this paper, we study distributed channel triggering mechanisms for wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) for conventional and smart sensors, i.e., sensors without and with computational power, respectively. We first consider the case of conventional sensors in which the state estimate is performed based on the intermittent raw measurements received from the sensor and we show that the priority measure is associated with the statistical properties of the observations, as it is the case of the cost of information loss (CoIL) [1]. Next, we consider the case of smart sensors and despite the fact that CoIL can also be deployed, we deduce that it is more beneficial to use the available measurements and we propose a function of the value of information (VoI) [2], [3] that also incorporates the channel conditions as the priority measure. The different scenarios and priority measures are discussed and compared for simple scenarios via simulations.