On time-triggered and event-based control of integrator systems over a shared communication system

When analyzing networked control systems, where the control loop is closed over a communication system, it is crucial to take the communication system into account. Hence, time-triggered and event-based control of an integrator system with noise over a shared communication system is analyzed. Thereby, analytical models of different communication systems are used and the analysis is focused on the effect of the communication system on the performance, as well as the interaction between control and communication. For time-triggered control, where the event times are known in advance, a deterministic communication protocol can be used. Hence, time-triggered control with the two most well-known deterministic communication protocols, time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA), is analyzed. For event-based control, where the events appear at random times, a contention-based communication protocol should be used. Hence, event-based control is analyzed with different contention-based communication protocols: pure ALOHA, slotted ALOHA, a queueing system, and Erlang’s loss model. It turns out that time-triggered control with either TDMA or FDMA outperforms event-based control with pure or slotted ALOHA. However, event-based control with a properly designed queueing system gives an even better performance. Thus, we conclude that it is crucial to take the details of the communication system into account.