Game Theoretic Feedback Control for Reliability Enhancement of EtherCAT-Based Networked Systems

EtherCAT has become one of the leading real-time Ethernet solutions for networked industrial systems, where a reliable communication infrastructure is needed due to highly error-prone environments. However, existing work on EtherCAT mainly focuses on clock synchronization and timeliness improvement. The reliability of EtherCAT-based networked systems has largely been ignored. In this paper, we present a proportional integral derivative (PID)-based feedback control scheme that aims at enhancing reliability of networked systems under timing and system resource constraints. Instead of retransmitting data upon error detection, we use forward error control technique based on inequality of arithmetic and geometric means to achieve the required system reliability at a low deadline miss rate of messages. We further optimize the forward error control technique and design a fast and fair error resilient mechanism by using a cooperative game. In addition to reliability enhancement, our PID-based error control scheme can also improve the stability of a system in terms of deadline miss rate in the presence of burst errors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve reliability enhancement of up to 91% compared to benchmarking methods.