Towards Event-Triggered NMPC for Efficient 6G Communications: Experimental Results and Open Problems

TL;DR

This paper presents an event-triggered nonlinear model predictive control scheme for 6G networked control systems, demonstrating efficient communication and stable control performance through experimental validation on a Furuta pendulum over a 6G platform.

Contribution

It introduces a novel event-triggered NMPC approach for 6G networks, optimizing communication efficiency while maintaining control stability, validated through real-world experiments.

Findings

Event-triggered control reduces communication compared to periodic schemes.

Control performance remains comparable under varying network conditions.

Analysis of network delays and their impact on control stability.

Abstract

Networked control systems enable real-time control and coordination of distributed systems, leveraging the low latency, high reliability, and massive connectivity offered by 5G and future 6G networks. Applications include autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial automation, and smart grids. Despite networked control algorithms admitting nominal stability guarantees even in the presence of delays and packet dropouts, their practical performance still heavily depends on the specific characteristics and conditions of the underlying network. To achieve the desired performance while efficiently using communication resources, co-design of control and communication is pivotal. Although periodic schemes, where communication instances are fixed, can provide reliable control performance, unnecessary transmissions, when updates are not needed, result in inefficient usage of network resources. In this paper, we investigate the potential for co-design of model predictive control and network communication. To this end, we design and implement an event-triggered nonlinear model predictive controller for stabilizing a Furuta pendulum communicating over a tailored open radio access network 6G research platform. We analyze the control performance as well as network utilization under varying channel conditions and event-triggering criteria. Additionally, we analyze the network-induced delay pattern and its interaction with the event-triggered controller. Our results show that the event-triggered control scheme achieves similar performance to periodic control with reduced communication demand.