Effect of switching delay on a networked control system

A networked control system (NCS) typically consists of a collection of controllers and sensors that can be connected to a plant across a network that supports a limited number of connections. A communication policy determines when to switch the connections between the different controllers, sensors and the plant. In this work we consider the scenario where each switch takes a finite amount of time to complete; during this time there are no active connections. We establish conditions under which the properties of observability and reachability are maintained and present detailed results for single-input, single-output systems.