Proceeding of the 11th World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation
Shenyang, China, June 29 - July 4 2014
Communication and Control Co-design
for Wireless Sensor Networked Control Systems
Jinna Li1,2 and Peng Zeng1
1. Key Laboratory of Networked Control Systems
Shenyang Institute of Automation ,Chinese Academy of Sciences
Liaoning 110016, P.R. China
2. Lab of Operation and Control
Shenyang Shenyang University of Chemical Technology
Liaoning 110142, P.R. China
lijinna 721@126.com; zp@sia.cn
Abstract This paper is concerned with communication and
control co-design for wireless sensor networked control system
(WSNCS) with time-varying delay. Jointly designing communi-
cation and control is an attractive paradigm for WSNCS, since
the control performance of WSNCS is high sensitive to resource-
constrained communication networks. The main idea of devised
scheme is searching an optimal event-triggered transmission
condition on the premise that wireless link capacity constraint
is satisfied and stability of systems is guaranteed. The main aim
of devised scheme is to greatly optimize control performance of
WSNCS. First, two wireless network architectures characterized
by multi-hop and star topology are put forward. Secondly, a
model of WSNCS with event-triggered transmission mechanism
is constructed. It is followed by stability analysis of WSNCS to
obtain the asymptotical stability condition of systems. And then
a search algorithm is presented for communication and control
co-design. Finally, numerical examples are given to illustrate
the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Index Terms Wireless sensor networked control systems;
event-triggered transmission; link capacity; asymptotical sta-
bility
I. I NTRODUCTION
Networked control systems (NCS) are distributed feed-
back systems wherein controlled nodes are distributed and
connected over a network medium [1-3]. If the wireless
sensor networks are utilized to be media used for control
systems information transfer, the special feedback control
system is called by wireless sensor networked control systems
(WSNCS). As is well known, advantages of NCS (such as
flexible installation and maintenance, lost cost and so on)
enable WSNCS are widely used in smart grids, process
This work is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant #61104093 to J. N. Li, #61174119, 61034006 to Y. Li,
#61174026 to W. Liang, #61104003 to C. Liu, the National High Technology
Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) under Grant
2011AA040101 to W. Liang, the Opening Project of Key Laboratory of
Networked Control Systems, Chinese Academy of Sciences to P. Zeng,
and Scientific Research Project of Liaoning Province of China under Grant
L2012141 to J. N. Li.
156
978-1-4799-5825-2/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE
Xuejun Zong3 , Meng Zheng1 , and Xiaoling Zhang1
3. College of Information Engineering
Shenyang University of Chemical Technology
Liaoning 110142, P.R. China
syictauto@126.com
control, etc. [4]. While limited link capacity leading to long
or unbound transmission delay necessarily pose challenges
on the analysis and synthesis for NCS. Hence, a rapidly
increasing focus on the joint design of communication and
control for NCS has been witnessed [5-9], such as co-
design of controller and capacity allocation [5], co-design of
scheduling and control system [6, 7], co-design of sampling
and control systems, etc.[8-14].
In this paper, the event-triggered sampling or transmission
scheme as a promising alterative for co-design of communi-
cation and control is research object. Compared with time-
triggered communication scheme, whether the data should
be sampled or not is verified based on a special triggering
condition. This approach allows a considerable reduction of
network load while guaranteeing the specific control perfor-
mance [9-14]. In [9-12], we easily find a common feature
that controller is first designed and then an event-triggering
condition is determined. That means that the event-triggering
sampling scheme for NCS is completed by two steps. By
following such results, [13] designed an algorithm to derive
controller gains and the event-triggering transmission condi-
tion in one step while meeting performance with respect
to disturbance. In [14], a event-triggering condition is derived
by using passivity theory such that a large class of output
feedback stabilizing controllers can be obtained.
Note that sometimes event-triggered control might not
contribute to the reduction of network resource occupancy
because transmissions are enforced to go on when transmis-
sion condition is triggered to reach a desired control perfor-
mance. Under the triggering condition, network even might
be overloaded leading to degrading the control performance
of systems. Hence, how to determine the triggering scheme
under communication constraints such that the desired con-
trol performance is achieved is a key to be investigated.
Although the above works on event-triggered sampling or
transmitting control for NCS have recently appeared in the
literature, communication constraints associated with sam-
pling or transmission still have not been taken into account, networks can be shared by control systems , and we use
which motivates the study presented in this paper. () to denote the end-to-end flow generated by the traffic
In this paper, two wireless network architectures charac- from the plant to controller for each . And ( ) and
terized by multi-hop and star topology are first put forward. () are used to denote all of the links that flow traverses
Based on it, a model of WSNCS with event-triggered trans- and all of the flows that pass by the link , respectively.
mission mechanism is proposed. Furthermore, a sufficient
condition for asymptotical stability of WSNCS is derived
based on Lyapunov method combined with Linear Matrix
Inequalities (LMI) approach. And then a search algorithm
to obtain the optimal triggering condition is presented for Controller 1 Actuator 1 Plant 1
communication and control co-design. It should be pointed
out the optimal triggering condition can guarantee the optimal
control performance of WSNCS on the premise that flow rate
Multi-hop wireless sensor
meets wireless link capacity constraint. Finally, numerical network
examples are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the
proposed method.
This paper is organized as follows. The problem statement
is presented in Section II. Section III is dedicated to stability

...
...
analysis of WSNCS. Section IV presents the communication
and control co-design scheme. Numerical and simulation
results are presented in Section V. Conclusions are stated
in Section VI.
Notation. and denote the n dimensional Euclidean Fig. 1. A wireless multi-hop sensor network
space and the set of all nm real matrices, respectively. N
denotes the the set of nonnegative integers, P > 0 means
that matrix P is real symmetric and positive definite. The
subscript T denotes the matrix transpose. In symmetric
block matrices, we use * to represent a term that is induced
by symmetry. Controller 1 Actuator 1 Plant 1

II. P ROBLEM S TATEMENT

A. Control System Model
Every continuous-time plant is governed by
x (t) = A x (t) + B u (t) (1)
where x (t) and u (t) ( ) are the state Sensor 1

vector and control input vector, respectively; A and B are Sensor 2

...

some constant matrices of appropriate dimensions. =
{1, 2, , }, and is the number of controlled plants.
The state feedback controller for each control loop can be
expressed as
u () = K x () (2)
where K is some constant matrix of appropriate dimensions.
B. Wireless Sensor Network Architectures
A multi-hop wireless sensor network as shown Fig. 1 is
modeled as a directed graph = (, ), where and
represent the set of sensor nodes and the set of directed
wireless links ( ), respectively [15]. For a special
case that star topology structure is applied in wireless sensor
networks, information is transmitted from sensor nodes to a
central node (base station). In this network, the central node
is wired to the controllers, see Fig. 2. Such two types of
Base station
Sensor G
Fig. 2. Star topology wireless sensor network
C. Event-triggered Networked Control System Formulation
It is well known that the digital controller and zero-order
holder (ZOH) are usually applied in the NCSs, in this context,
the states of systems are sampled and are transmitted over
networks. For every controlled plant ( ), we assume
that the sensors are time-triggered at the time instant
( = 0, 1, 2, ), where N. The sampling sequence is
denoted by the set S1 = {0, , 2, } and is a constant
sampling interval. Moreover we also assume transmission
over network is triggered by an event. Thus the transmission

157
sequence at the sensors are described by the set S,2 = We can obtained
{0, ,1 , ,2 , , , }, where , N and S,2 S1 .
First a designed transmission scheme is proposed as fol- () = 2xT ()Px ()
lows [13] + 2[x ()N1 + xT
T
(, )N2 + x T
()N3 ]

,+1 = , + min{ T
(, ) ( ) } (3) [x () x (, ) x ()]

,
where ( ) = ( ) (, ) denotes the error + 2[xT T
T
()M1 + x (, )M2 + x ()M3 ]
between the states at the current sampling time instant
[A x () B K x (, ) + x ()]
and at the latest transmitted sampling time instant, =
T (, ) (, ) and 0 ( ) are given scalar + x T ()T () x T ()
x ()Tx
parameters. Note that = , + ( N) in the proposed
transmission scheme. + e (, )e (, ) eT
T
(, )e (, ) (8)
Then, we construct the WSNC model base on the above
event-triggered transmission scheme. A wireless sensor net- Since () = , , when [, + , , ,+1 +
work is used to connect the plants (1) with the controllers, ,+1 ), it leads to
and the state feedback controllers are directly connected to
the actuator by ZOH, thus (1) can be rewritten as x T
()T
x () x T ()
()Tx (9)
,
x (t) = A x (t) + B u (t)
Base on the transmission scheme (3), for ,
u () = K x (, ) (4) [, , ,+1 ), we have
for [, + , , ,+1 + ,+1 ), where , denotes
eT T
(, )e (, ) e (, )e (, ) (10)
the transmission delay experienced by transmitted packet at
, time instant. and
Define () = , , it is clear that 0 ,
2[xT T
()N1 + x (, )N2 + x T ()N3 ] , x ()
() ,+1 , + ,+1 . Set = sup , and
= sup(,+1 , ), then () = + . Thus, xT ()
1 T T
(4) can be described as a time delay-dependent system [xT T
() x (, ) x T
()]N T N x (, )
x T
()
x (t) = A x (t) + B K x ( ()) T
+ , x ()Tx ()
x () = (), [0 , 0 ], (0 ) = x0 (5) (11)
Set () = [xT () x T
(, )
x T
()] T
, we have ()
III. S TABILITY A NALYSIS OF WSNCS
T () (), where
In this section, stability analysis is presented for the [ ]
concerned WSNCS. This result is critical for communication + N T1 NT 0
= (12)
and control co-design.
Theorem 1. For given scalars and , a matrix K , under
the transmission rule (3), the system (5) is asymptotically ,11 ,12 ,13 N1
stable, if there exist matrices N , M ( = 1, 2, 3), P > 0, = ,22 ,23 , NT =
N2 (13)
T > 0 and > 0, such that ,33 N3

,11 ,12 13 N1 0 By Schur complement, (6) is equivalent to < 0, and by
,22 ,23 N2 0 (6), we have () < 0. This completes the proof.

,33 N3 0
<0 (6)
IV. C OMMUNICATION AND C ONTROL C O - DESIGN
T 0
For the transmission scheme (3), it is obvious that the
communication load and control performance of systems
where ,11 = N1 + NT T
1 M1 M1 , ,12 = N2
T
are determined by the parameters , and . Note
T T T T T
N1 A M2 M,1 B K , ,13 = N3 A M3 + M1 + P, how by enlarging we reduce transmission to satisfy the
,22 = N2 NT T T T
2 M2 B K K B M2 + , ,23 = communication constraint, but thus we also degrade the
N3 + M2 K B M3 , ,33 = MT
T T T T
3 + M3 + T . Proof. control performance of systems. Hence, can be used as
Choose a Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional candidate [15] as a designed parameter to trade off between limited commu-
follows nication resource and desired control performance. It is well

known that the smaller is, the faster the transmission is,
T
() = x ()P x () + x T ()(7)
()T x
thus it might lead to flow exceeding the upper bound.

158
 TABLE I
Since we only take the control systems associated with
C OMPARISON WITH CONSTANT SAMPLING
forward flow into account in this paper, = ,+1 ,
represents the traffic flow rate generated by the control system 1 Average flow rate
, where sample size is the size of each transmitted 0.001 0.0101 0.1817 4403
0.05 0.0105 0.1938 4128
packet, and ,+1 , denotes the transmission period 0.1 0.01 0.2604 3072
with which the flow is associated for the control system .
Let and be the average link capacity and the virtual link
capacity margin of link . Now, the infimum of is Step 4. If > , exit.
derived by using the following optimal methods. Remark 2. denotes the run time, = 0, 1, 2, , and
A. Multi-hop wireless sensor network case is the threshold of run time. In general, a large
For wireless multi-hop sensor network-based control sys- is more prefer to obtain the optimal .
tems, we provide the following optimization problem. V. I LLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES
1 min ( ) (14) In this section, we verify the effectiveness of the proposed
.. (6) (15) method by using two examples.
Example 1. In this example, WSNCS consists of a star
(16) topology network and one closed-loop control system. The
, ()& ()
control system is described as [16]
Remark 1. ()& () denotes the all flows that are [ ] [ ]
0 1 0
associated with the control system and traverse the link ,
x() = x() + u() (20)
0 0.1 0.1
and , ()& () means that the sum of
flow rates generated by all of the control systems exchanging In this simulation, packet size is 100 bytes, = 6000,
information over link must satisfy the maximum allowable 1 = 10, 1 = 0.01, = 500, = 0.8695, and the
rate of link . initial state is 0 = [0.3 0.1]T . And in the transmission
scheme (3), we set
B. Star topology wireless sensor network case [ ]
1 0
For the situation that star topology wireless sensor network = (21)
0 1
as communication medium of WSNCS, the optimization
problem is formulated below By monte carlo method, we produce transmission delay
during [0, ], = 2 . We choose K = [3.75 11.5]
2 min ( ) (17)
[16]. By Algorithm 1, the infimums of 1 and the average
.. (6) (18) transmission intervals for different sampling period
(19) are obtained and are listed in Table 1. From Table 1, we
can find that the flow rate is within the link capacity limit
The main objective of the focused communication and
and the average transmission interval is larger than the
control co-design is search the infimum of associated with
constant sampling period. This shows that network resource
flow rate for the control systems , such that the control
occupation is reduced.
performance can be optimized under the condition that the
Example 2. Consider two control systems sharing a
link capacity constraint is satisfied. Obviously, the problems
wireless multi-hop sensor network with the parameters (see
1 and 2 are non-trivial the nonlinear interactions posed by
[16, 17])
the tight coupling relationship between transmission rate and [ ] [ ]
. To solve this problem, we provide a research algorithm 0 1 0
A1 = , B1 = (22)
to achieve the optimal solution of the problem 1 and 2 . 0 0.1 0.1
Algorithm 1: [ ] [ ]
Step 1. For given scalars , , ( ), , and 0 1 0
A2 = , B2 = (23)
matrices K ( ), set = + , where (0 < < 1) 1 0 1
are step sizes and are initially set to zero; Similar to Example1, we set
Step 2. For each control system , if there exist a feasible [ ]
1 0
solution satisfying (6), go to Step 3; otherwise, go to Step 1; = (24)
0 1
Step 3. Execute the transmission scheme (3) and calculate
flow rate generated by the control system , if there exist And the topology structure of wireless multi-hop sensor
one control system that cant meet constraint condition (16) network is shown in Fig. 3. Note that the link 2 is shared by
(or (19)), go to Step 1 in order to update ; otherwise, go the above two plants in the presented topology structure. In
to Step 4; addition, some necessary simulation parameters still need to

159
be determined in advance, we set packet size to 100 bytes, 0.2
the link capacity = 5000, virtual link capacity margin x1
= 10 , = 0.01 ( = 1, 2), = 0.9940 and 0.15 x2

= 500. For the control system (23), we choose the

0.1
same controller gain and the initial state as those in Example
1, and the controller gain K = [1.006 1.006] [17] and 0.05

State variables
the initial state 2 (0) = [0.03 0.01]T are utilized for the
control system (24). For the sampling period = 0.05, 0

transmission delay that belongs to [0, 2 ] can be produced 0.05

by Monte carlo method.
By Algorithm 1, the infimums 0.3561 and 0.3565 of 1 0.1

and 2 are obtained, respectively. Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 show the 0.15
state responses of the two control systems under the obtained
infimums of ( = 1, 2). From Fig. 4 and Fig. 5, one can 0.2
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500
easily see that the two systems have been stabilized under Time (s)

the presented controller when performing the transmission

scheme (3) if 1 and 2 are set to 0.3561 and 0.3565. Fig. 5. The state responses of the system (23)

Link 3
Link 1 and asymptotical stability condition. Moreover, the designed
Link2 method is simple and easily applicable since any model
Link 4
assumptions on the time-vary delay dont be made. The
Link 5
examples and simulations show the effectiveness of the
Link 6
proposed method.

Fig. 3. A wireless multi-hop sensor network R EFERENCES

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