Fundamental Limitations of Disturbance Attenuation in the Presence of Side Information

In this paper, we study fundamental limitations of disturbance attenuation of feedback systems, under the assumption that the controller has a finite horizon preview of the disturbance. In contrast with prior work, we extend Bode’s integral equation for the case where the preview is made available to the controller via a general, finite capacity, communication system. Under asymptotic stationarity assumptions, our results show that the new fundamental limitation differs from Bode’s only by a constant, which quantifies the information rate through the communication system. In the absence of stationarity, we derive a universal lower bound which uses entropy rates as a measure of performance.