Try-once-discard scheduling for stochastic networked control systems

In practical networked control systems (NCS), such as smart grids, cooperative robotics, and sensor networks, often multiple control applications share a communication infrastructure, requiring a smart and efficient scheduling mechanism to coordinate the access to the capacity-limited communication medium. In this article we consider the problem of event-based scheduling design for NCSs consisting of multiple control loops over a shared communication medium. We extend the notion of Try-Once-Discard (TOD), which is one of the basic deterministic event-based scheduling protocols for resource constrained NCSs, to the case of multiple stochastic control systems coupled via a shared communication medium subject to capacity limitation and stochastic packet delivery failure. Showing that the overall network-induced error is a homogeneous Markov chain in our stochastic set-up, we first study stability properties of such networked systems under the TOD scheduling scheme employing the concepts of stochastic stability. Then, we derive sufficient stability conditions under the TOD rule assuming that the communication channel is not ideal, i.e. a scheduled data packet for transmission might be lost in the communication channel with a non-zero probability. Furthermore, we derive analytic performance bounds by finding uniform upper-bounds for an average quadratic cost function. The numerical simulations are performed for variety of system parameters and NCS set-ups to strengthen our stability claim as well as illustrating performance bounds. Additionally, we show that the TOD scheduling rule outperforms the conventional time-triggered, and uniform and non-uniform random channel access arbitration mechanisms, in terms of efficient coordination of channel access in stochastic NCSs.