Stability of Networked Control Systems with Stochastic Protocols

This paper introduces a new definition of stochastic protocols for networked control systems (NCS) and the stochastic analogue of the notion of uniform persistency of excitation of protocols first presented in (M. Tabbara, D. Nesic, and A. Teel, "Input-output stability of wireless networked control systems," in Proc. 44th IEEE Conf. on Dec. and Control, 2005.). Our framework applies directly to common wireless and wireline NCS, including those built on collision-sense multiple access (CSMA) style protocols, with Ethernet and 802.11a/b/g as prime examples of this class. We present conditions for a general class of nonlinear NCS with exogenous disturbances using stochastic protocols in the presence of packet dropouts, random packet transmission times and collisions that are sufficient for L_p stability from exogenous disturbance to NCS state with a linear finite expected gain.