Control-Aware Random Access Communication

In modern control applications multiple wireless sensors need to efficiently share the available wireless medium to communicate with their respective actuators. Random access policies, where each sensor independently decides whether to access the shared wireless medium, are attractive as they do not require central coordination. However interference between simultaneous transmissions causes transmitted packets to collide, leading to control performance degradation or potentially instability. Given plant and controller dynamics, we derive a sufficient condition for the access policy employed by each sensor so that wireless interference does not violate stability of any involved control loop. Based on this decoupling condition we design random access communication policies that are control-aware by adapting to the physical plant states measured by the sensors online. The control performance of our design is illustrated in numerical simulations.