Network-based control adaptation for network QoS variation

Networks and their applications have been evolving substantially in the last two decades. A new and promising use of networks is in the area of high performance control and automation, which is developing into attractive and widespread military applications such as autonomous unmanned vehicles and telerobotics. Some of the major concerns in using networks to perform remote network-based control are QoS issues such as time delay and bandwidth constraints. Disturbances and unanticipated events often happen to network-based applications. When anomalies happen, if the network cannot provide the required QoS, the application may have to lower its performance requirement and use the assigned QoS to do the best as it can to maintain the application availability. This paper proposes the use of real-time application gain adaptation to compensate for QoS variations and deterioration. A network-based controlled dc motor, which is often used in military vehicles for actuation and propulsion systems, is used in this paper to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. In addition, this proactive use of application adaptability provides an extra degree of freedom for network QoS negotiation, protocol design and implementation.