Control Aware Communication Design for Time Sensitive Wireless Systems

Abstract

We consider the problem of allocating radio resources over wireless communication links to control a series of independent low-latency wireless control systems common in industrial settings. Supporting wireless control in time sensitive settings requires fast data rates over wireless links, which comes at the cost of reliability. It is challenging to meet both latency and reliability requirements with an equal or arbitrary allocation of resources. We thus propose a novel control-aware approach to the low-latency scheduling problem in which we incorporate control and channel state information in allocating bandwidth and data rates across the wireless links. Control systems that are in desirable states are given modest requirements on error rates, while systems in undesirable states are given more priority. We derive control-aware packet error rate targets for each system to satisfy stability goals and make scheduling decisions to meet such targets while reducing total transmission time. The resulting control-aware based method is tested in simulation experiments that demonstrate its effectiveness in meeting control-based goals under tight latency constraints relative to control-agnostic scheduling.