Protocol sequence based wireless media access control in networked control systems

In some real-time networked control applications, information between sensors and controllers is exchanged over a shared wireless channel. One key issue is to manage multiple access to the shared medium to accomplish different control tasks. In the paper, a protocol sequence based media access control (MAC) design is presented for networked control systems (NCSs). It is challenging to design an optimal or suboptimal controller since the sensor packets and control packets could be lost in unreliable wireless networks. An ad hoc and efficient control policy is presented. Numerical results illustrate that the cost performance of the protocol sequence based NCS is much better than that of the π-persistent random access based NCS.