Distributed Channel Access for Control Over Known and Unknown Gilbert–Elliott Channels

In this article, we consider the distributed channel access problem for a system consisting of multiple control subsystems that close their loop over a shared wireless network with multiple channels subject to Markovian packet dropouts. Provided that an acknowledgement/ negative-acknowledgement feedback mechanism is in place, we show that this problem can be formulated as a Markov decision process. We then transform this problem to a form that enables distributed control-aware channel access. More specifically, we show that the control objective can be minimized without requiring information exchange between subsystems as long as the channel parameters are known. The objective is attained by adopting a priority-based deterministic channel access method and the stability of the system under the resulting scheme is analyzed. Next, we consider a practical scenario in which the channel parameters are unknown and adopt a learning method based on Bayesian inference, which is compatible with distributed implementation. We propose a heuristic posterior sampling algorithm, which is shown to significantly improve performance via simulations.