Scheduling of Measurement Transmission in Networked Control Systems Subject to Communication Constraints

In this paper, we consider Networked Control Systems where the transmission of sensor data is restricted in terms of a fixed communication budget due to the limited capacity of the underlying network. Therefore, the remote estimator cannot be supplied with measurements every time step, which impacts the accuracy of the estimates and consequently the achievable control performance. In order to trade off estimation accuracy against the costs of measurement transmission, we formulate the considered task as an optimal control problem, so that it fits into the broader class of sensor and measurement scheduling problems. As the optimal solution of such problems is generally intractable, we derive a suboptimal algorithm based on randomized rounding. In two numerical examples, we show that the proposed approach can outperfom a state-of-the-art sensor selection algorithm.