Information theoretic conditions for tracking in leader-follower systems with communication constraints

In this paper, we introduce a general framework for tracking in leader-follower systems under communication constraints, in which the leader and follower systems as well as the corresponding controllers are spatially distributed and connected over communication links.We provide necessary conditions on the channel data rate of each communication link for tracking of the leader-follower systems. By considering the forward and feedback channels as one cascade channel, we also provide a lower bound for the data rate of the cascade channel for the system to track a reference signal such that the tracking error has finite second moment. Examples and simulations are provided to demonstrate some of the results.