State-Aware Resource Allocation for Wireless Closed-Loop Control Based on Multi-Connectivity

Control communications co-design enables robust and scalable wireless closed-loop control system design. We study the metric “control-communications availability” that allows consecutive errors until the control application is deemed dysfunctional. Multi-connectivity helps increasing the network availability, but there is a lack of dynamic and resource efficient link management. Thus, we propose the “state-aware resource allocation” scheme, whereby parallel links can be assigned adaptively to a given connection, depending on the number of previously, consecutively lost packets. We develop a Markov chain that captures the novel resource allocation approach suited for closed-loop wireless control applications. Our approach outperforms static dual connectivity by two orders of magnitude in terms of control-communications availability while reducing the amount of required resources to approximately half.