Time-and event-driven communication process for networked control systems: A survey

Copyright © 2014 Lei Zou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In recent years, theoretical and practical research topics on networked control systems (NCSs) have gained an increasing interest from many researchers in a variety of disciplines owing to the extensive applications of NCSs in practice. In particular, an urgent need has arisen to understand the effects of communication processes on system performances. Sampling and protocol are two fundamental aspects of a communication process which have attracted a great deal of research attention. Most research focus has been on the analysis and control of dynamical behaviors under certain sampling procedures and communication protocols. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis issues of NCSs with different sampling procedures (time-and event-driven sampling) and protocols (static and dynamic protocols). First, these sampling procedures and protocols are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds as well as dynamic natures. Then, the developments of the stabilization, control, and filtering problems are systematically reviewed and discussed in great detail. Finally, we conclude the paper by outlining future research challenges for analysis and synthesis problems of NCSs with different communication processes.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Distributed filtering of networked dynamic systems with non-gaussian noises over sensor networks: A survey

summary:Sensor networks are regarded as a promising technology in the field of information perception and processing owing to the ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, as well as reliability. The information exchange among sensors inevitably suffers from various network-induced phenomena caused by the limited resource utilization and complex application scenarios, and thus is required to be governed by suitable resource-saving communication mechanisms. It is also noteworthy that noises in system dynamics and sensor measurements are ubiquitous and in general unknown but can be bounded, rather than follow specific Gaussian distributions as assumed in Kalman-type filtering. Particular attention of this paper is paid to a survey of recent advances in distributed filtering of networked dynamic systems with non-Gaussian noises over sensor networks. First, two types of widely employed structures of distributed filters are reviewed, the corresponding analysis is systematically addressed, and some interesting results are provided. The inherent purpose of adding consensus terms into the distributed filters is profoundly disclosed. Then, some representative models characterizing various network-induced phenomena are reviewed and their corresponding analytical strategies are exhibited in detail. Furthermore, recent results on distributed filtering with non-Gaussian noises are sorted out in accordance with different network-induced phenomena and system models. Another emphasis is laid on recent developments of distributed filtering with various communication scheduling, which are summarized based on the inherent characteristics of their dynamic behavior associated with mathematical models. Finally, the state-of-the-art of distributed filtering and challenging issues, ranging from scalability, security to applications, are raised to guide possible future research

Non-fragile estimation for discrete-time T-S fuzzy systems with event-triggered protocol

summary:This paper investigates the non-fragile state estimation problem for a class of discrete-time T-S fuzzy systems with time-delays and multiple missing measurements under event-triggered mechanism. First of all, the plant is subject to the time-varying delays and the stochastic disturbances. Next, a random white sequence, the element of which obeys a general probabilistic distribution defined on $[0,1]$, is utilized to formulate the occurrence of the missing measurements. Also, an event generator function is employed to regulate the transmission of data to save the precious energy. Then, a non-fragile state estimator is constructed to reflect the randomly occurring gain variations in the implementing process. By means of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional, the desired sufficient conditions are obtained such that the Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy estimation error system is exponentially ultimately bounded in the mean square. And then the upper bound is minimized via the robust optimization technique and the estimator gain matrices can be calculated. Finally, a simulation example is utilized to demonstrate the effectiveness of the state estimation scheme proposed in this paper

Fault estimation for time-varying systems with Round-Robin protocol

summary:This paper is concerned with the design problem of finite-horizon $H_\infty$ fault estimator for a class of nonlinear time-varying systems with Round-Robin protocol scheduling. The faults are assumed to occur in a random way governed by a Bernoulli distributed white sequence. The communication between the sensor nodes and fault estimators is implemented via a shared network. In order to prevent the data from collisions, a Round-Robin protocol is utilized to orchestrate the transmission of sensor nodes. By means of the stochastic analysis technique and the completing squares method, a necessary and sufficient condition is established for the existence of fault estimator ensuring that the estimation error dynamics satisfies the prescribed $H_\infty$ constraint. The time-varying parameters of fault estimator are obtained by recursively solving a set of coupled backward Riccati difference equations. A simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design scheme of the fault estimator

Synchronization protocols and implementation issues in wireless sensor networks: A review

Time synchronization in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a topic that has been attracting the research community in the last decade. Most performance evaluations of the proposed solutions have been limited to theoretical analysis and simulation. They consequently ignored several practical aspects, e.g., packet handling jitters, clock drifting, packet loss, and mote limitations, which affect real implementation on sensor motes. Authors of some pragmatic solutions followed empirical approaches for the evaluation, where the proposed solutions have been implemented on real motes and evaluated in testbed experiments. This paper gives an insight on issues related to the implementation of synchronization protocols in WSN. The challenges related to WSN environment are presented; the importance of real implementation and testbed evaluation are motivated by some experiments we conducted. The most relevant implementations of the literature are then reviewed, discussed, and qualitatively compared. While there are several survey papers that present and compare the protocols from the conception perspectives, as well as others that deal with mathematical and signal processing issues of the estimators, a survey on practical aspects related to the implementation is missing. To our knowledge, this paper is the first one that takes into account the practical aspect of existing solutions