Packetized Predictive Control over Erasure Channels

In digital networked control systems links between controller and plant are not transparent, but are affected by time-delays, data-dropouts and quantization. An important observation is that, in contemporary communication networks, such as those employing Ethernet, data is sent in large packets. This motivates the development of networked control schemes where signal predictions are sent as packets. In the present work we present such a strategy. We focus on a configuration where the controller output is connected to the plant input via a network which we assume is prone to transmission errors. By using methods from predictive control theory, we show how closed loop stability can be ensured directly in the design.