Decentralized Control with Communication Bandwidth Constraints

In this paper, we consider the decentralized control problem in the setting of limited bandwidth sensing channels. Specifically, we consider stabilization of a linear time-invariant(LTI) plant by multiple controllers, that receive sensing information through limited bit rate channels, and cannot communicate directly with each other. The main result of the this paper is a sufficient condition on the respective channel rates to guarantee system stabilizability. We also provide an explicit way to construct the associated encoder, decoder and controller to achieve stability. The encoder and decoder have very simple structure. The extra communication cost induced by the decentralized structure is illustrated with an example.