Scaling Beyond Bandwidth Limitations: Wireless Control With Stability Guarantees Under Overload

TL;DR

This paper introduces a co-designed wireless control approach that dynamically allocates bandwidth to maintain stability and improve control performance in overloaded cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

It proposes a novel joint control and communication method that ensures stability and better performance during overload conditions, validated on a real testbed.

Findings

Enhanced control performance under overload conditions

Guarantees of closed-loop stability for stochastic systems

Successful implementation on a 20-agent testbed

Abstract

An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network. Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing control-over-wireless solutions is limited as they cannot resolve overload situations in which the communication demand exceeds the available bandwidth. This paper presents a novel co-design of distributed control and wireless communication that overcomes this limitation by dynamically allocating the available bandwidth to agents with the greatest need to communicate. Experiments on a real cyber-physical testbed with 20 agents, each consisting of a low-power wireless embedded device and a cart-pole system, demonstrate that our solution achieves significantly better control performance under overload than the state of the art. We further prove that our co-design guarantees closed-loop stability for physical systems with stochastic linear time-invariant dynamics.