Zero MAC Latency Sensor Networking for Cyber-Physical Systems

In this paper, we consider a cyber-physical system, where an unstable dynamic plant is monitored by multiple distributed sensors over a wireless network with a shared common spectrum. We propose a novel zero-latency MAC protocol for cyber-physical systems. The proposed scheme exploits interferences and collisions among active sensors in the wireless channels to enhance the performance of remote state estimation. Using the Lyapunov drift analysis approach, we further establish closed-form necessary and sufficient requirements on the communication resources needed to achieve stabilization of the cyber-physical system. Large system analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme has superior scalability with respect to a large number of sensors. The proposed scheme is also compared with various state-of-the-art baselines and we show that significant performance gains can be achieved.