Joint Optimization of Wireless Network Energy Consumption and Control System Performance in Wireless Networked Control Systems

Communication system design for wireless networked control systems requires satisfying the high reliability and strict delay constraints of control systems for guaranteed stability, with the limited battery resources of sensor nodes, despite the wireless networking induced non-idealities. These include non-zero packet error probability caused by the unreliability of wireless transmissions and non-zero delay resulting from packet transmission and shared wireless medium. In this paper, we study the joint optimization of control and communication systems incorporating their efficient abstractions practically used in real-world scenarios. The proposed framework allows including any non-decreasing function of the power consumption of the nodes as the objective, any modulation scheme and any scheduling algorithm. We first introduce an exact solution method based on the analysis of the optimality conditions and smart enumeration techniques. Then, we propose two polynomial-time heuristic algorithms based on intelligent search space reduction and smart searching techniques. Extensive simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms perform very close to optimal and much better than previous algorithms at much smaller runtime for various scenarios.