Contents I. Introduction
Historically, communication and control have been separate research areas with more or less independent theories. Recently, however, there has been an increasing demand on networks consisting of control and communication systems which are subject to uncertainty and limited time-varying channel capacity. In such applications, due to finite capacity, the system state cannot be represented with high precision at the output of the communication channel, and only a distorted version of system state or system output is available for feedback. Therefore, the fundamental questions raised here is to find encoders, decoders and controllers to achieve certain performance objectives associated with the control and communication subsystems. In this paper, the primary performance objective is stabilization of the dynamical system with simple scalar quantization schema and, once the system is stabilizable, the main problem is how to ensure stabilization with data rates as small as possible. The problem is of great interest in wireless sensor networks where the energy consumption for transmission is to be minimized in order to maximize the network life time.
