Dynamic data packing towards the optimization of QoC and QoS in networked control systems

A class of networked control systems is investigated whose communication network is shared with other applications. The design objective for such a system setting is not only the optimization of the control performance but also the efficient utilization of the communication resources. We observe that at a large time scale the data packet delay in the communication network is roughly varying piecewise constant, which is typically true for data networks like the Internet. Based on this observation, a dynamic data packing scheme is proposed within the recently developed packet-based control framework for networked control systems. As expected this proposed approach achieves a fine balance between the control performance and the communication utilization： the similar control performance can be obtained at dramatically reduced cost of the communication resources. Simulations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.