On stability in the presence of analog erasure channels

Consider a discrete-time networked control scheme, in which the controller has direct access to noisy measurements of the plant¿s output, but the controller and the actuator are connected via a link that features Bernoulli erasure events. We determine necessary and sufficient conditions for the stabilizability of an unstable linear and time-invariant plant. We show that these conditions are identical for two types of actuators: (1) (Type I) Processing at the actuator has access to the plant¿s model; (2) (Type II) Processing at the actuator uses a universal algorithm that does not depend on the model of the plant. We also identify cases where availability of acknowledgements over the controller-actuator channel is not required for stability. We also consider decentralized networked control structures, where two or more independent controller-link-actuator assemblies have access to different measurements of the plant¿s output.