Control over Wireless Networks

Sachin Adlakha
November 18, 2005
 Objectives

 Provide some motivation – Why do control over Wireless

Networks?
 Explore challenges in the field
 Review some existing work
 Ask pertinent questions and brainstorm
 To discuss some ideas in my head!
 What is not an objective!

 To pose or discuss a problem

 In fact part of the objective is to come up with interesting
and pertinent problems.
 To provide a literature survey
 Would only discuss some work in the field
 There are experts on this area in this room
 To provide a solution to a existing problem
 I wish I could do it right away 
 Motivation

 So Why do control over networks?

 Beyond because we might get funding in this area
 Beyond because everyone else seems to be interested in the
work and it seems cool!

 Because it actually has a potential to transform the way

we interact with out environment
 What led us to believe it?

 Traditional Networks
 Exchange information

 MEMS + networks = sensor networks

 Allows us to interact with the environment

 Control over networks

 Allows us to control the environment remotely via
sensor networks!
 So how are we going to do this?

 On Control side
 Change traditional models, assumptions, and philosophy to work
in bursty, unreliable and packetized environment
 Design controllers to take into account communication nuances
like delay, losses etc
 Basically take away all nice and workable assumptions control
theorists have made till now
 On Communications side
 More reliable communication strategies – like TCP but with less
delay
 Provide characterization of channels in forms which are more
meaningful for control applications. E.g. Delay dependent capacity
etc!
 Review of existing work

 On Control side
 Sinopoli et al “Kalman filtering with intermittent observations”
 Found maximum tolerable packet loss beyond which Kalman
filtering go unstable.
 Liu et al “Kalman filtering with partial observation losses”
 Extended the above work for partial observations of the sensors
 Gupta et al, “Optimal LQG Control Across Packet Dropping
Links”
 Similar to above but considers a control algorithm over lossy
links.
On the control side, the work has concentrated on modifying
existing control philosophy to take into account the quirks of
the communication channels.
 On Communications Side
 Liu et al, “Wireless Medium Access Control in Networked Control
Systems”
 Study the effect of MAC protocol on performance of networked
control systems
 Mostofi et al, “Communications and sensing Trade-offs in
Decentralized Mobile Sensor Networks: A Cross-Layer Design
Approach”
 Study tradeoffs between sensing and communications objectives in
decentralized control setting

On Communications side, the objective has been to design

mechanisms and protocols for providing reliability over the
channel for controllers to work
 So what next…

 First step
 Understand the behavior of Kalman estimators over correlated
channels.
 To begin with consider Gilbert Elliott channel
 Simple but captures the essential correlations in the channel
 Probably tractable

 What are the right metrics for control performance

 If the systems is stable but has huge variations in its error about its
mean
 The error is bounded but oscillates.
 More Questions

 In scenarios with network of sensors feeding to a

controller
 What is the effect of tradeoff between sensor aggregation and
communication on overall control performance?
 Can the correlation in information between sensor readings help in
improving the performance of controllers?

 How does limited capacity affect the controller

performance?
 And Many more questions!!