Control design in a distributed WNCS using energy optimal scheduled medium access

In Wireless Networked Control Systems (WNCS) with more than one concurrent control loop accessing the network, we need a control design that incorporates effects from the communication protocol (delays, packet dropouts, jitter) as well as energy and computation restrictions of the network nodes (e.g. bandwidth, node energy, transmission power). In practice, increasing communication frequency leads to a decreasing network lifetime and vice versa. In literature this joint design approach is referred to as control-communication or control-scheduling co-design. In this work, we present a new approach for the synthesis of robust or gain-scheduled controllers in a distributed WNCS, depending only on the sampling period. We use a scheduling policy computed by an iterative optimization algorithm to maximize the network lifetime and guarantee Lyapunov stability of the selected feedback control law with bounded delay and sampling intervals.