On rate allocation for multiple plants in a networked control system

The problem of allocating communication resources to multiple plants in a networked control system is investigated. In the presence of a shared communication medium, a total transmission rate constraint is imposed. For the purpose of optimizing the rate allocation to the plants over a finite horizon, two objective functions are considered. The first one is a single-objective function, and the second one is a multi-objective function. Because of the difficulty to derive the closed-form expression of these functions, which depend on the instantaneous communication rate, an approximation is proposed by using high-rate quantization theory. It is shown that the approximate objective functions are convex in the region of interest both in the scalar case and in the multi-objective case. This allows to establish a linear control policy given by the classical linear quadratic Gaussian theory as function of the channel. Based on this result, a new complex relation between the control performance and the channel error probability is characterized.