Control Aware Radio Resource Allocation in Low Latency Wireless Control Systems

We consider the problem of allocating radio resources over wireless communication links to control a series of independent wireless control systems. Low-latency transmissions are necessary in enabling time-sensitive control systems with high sampling rates to operate over wireless links. Enabling low-latency through fast data rates comes at the cost of reliability in the form of higher packet error rates due to channel noise. However, the impact of such communication link errors on the control system performance depends dynamically on the control system state. We propose a novel control-aware communication design to the low-latency resource allocation problem. In our proposed method, we incorporate both control and channel state information in scheduling transmissions across time slots, frequency bands, and data rates using the next-generation Wi-Fi scheduling architecture. Control systems that are closer to instability or further from a desired range in a given control cycle are given higher packet delivery rate targets to meet. Rather than a simple priority ranking, we derive precise adaptive packet error rate targets for each system needed to satisfy control-specific performance requirements. We use these adaptive rate targets to make scheduling decisions that reduce total transmission time. The resulting control-aware low-latency scheduling (CALLS) method is tested in numerous simulation experiments that demonstrate its effectiveness in meeting control-based goals under tight latency constraints relative to control-agnostic scheduling.