Context-Aware Communication to Stabilize Bandwidth-Limited Nonlinear Networked Control Systems

In this paper, context-aware communication that stabilizes a class of nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) operating over a bandwidth-limited shared-channel is proposed to reduce network traffic. The NCS under consideration includes feedback and feed forward communication channels, and is assumed to be perturbed by an unmodeled, nonlinear disturbance. Informational value of the output states can be analyzed in the context of system stability using model-based approaches. When fused with event-based triggering, these context-aware communication policies result in a periodic feedback and feed forward signals that guarantee uniformly ultimately bounded tracking of output states of an uncertain perturbed system along the desired time-varying trajectory. The proposed NCS is validated using extensive simulation results for nonlinear coupled MIMO systems.