Dynamic data packing towards the optimization of QoC and QoS in networked control systems

A class of networked control systems is investigated whose communication network is shared with other applications. The design objective for such a system setting is not only the optimization of the control performance but also the efficient utilization of the communication resources. We observe that at a large time scale the data packet delay in the communication network is roughly varying piecewise constant, which is typically true for data networks like the Internet. Based on this observation, a dynamic data packing scheme is proposed within the recently developed packet-based control framework for networked control systems. As expected this proposed approach achieves a fine balance between the control performance and the communication utilization: the similar control performance can be obtained at dramatically reduced cost of the communication resources. Simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.