Event Triggered Adaptive Differential Modulation: A New Method for Traffic Reduction in Networked Control Systems

Congestion in a networked control system (NCS) has many undesirable effects that can make a control system unstable if severe enough. These include delays and packet drops. Therefore, reducing network traffic, including traffic generated by the NCS itself is a necessity. In event based control (EBC) a control signal is generated when a specific event is triggered such as the control error exceeding a predetermined threshold. When the rate of change of a variable is bounded, event triggering reduces the effective frequency in which control signals have to be generated when compared to a system with periodic sampling. This paper proposes a new method of event triggering called event triggered adaptive differential modulation (ETADM) that combines the bandwidth reduction strategies of event triggering and human speech coding techniques. The proposed method can be applied to nonlinear systems with a stabilizing feedback. In addition, it can be shown to be robust to packet drops. Stability for this method can be analyzed in terms of input to state stability (ISS) for a given bound of the signal reconstruction error.