On the effect of quantization on performance at high rates

We study the effect of quantization on the performance of a scalar dynamical system in the high rate regime. We evaluate the LQ cost for two commonly used quantizers: uniform and logarithmic and provide a lower bound on performance of any centroid-based quantizer based on entropy arguments. We also consider the case when the channel drops data packets stochastically

An Optimal Transmission Strategy for Kalman Filtering over Packet Dropping Links with Imperfect Acknowledgements

This paper presents a novel design methodology for optimal transmission policies at a smart sensor to remotely estimate the state of a stable linear stochastic dynamical system. The sensor makes measurements of the process and forms estimates of the state using a local Kalman filter. The sensor transmits quantized information over a packet dropping link to the remote receiver. The receiver sends packet receipt acknowledgments back to the sensor via an erroneous feedback communication channel which is itself packet dropping. The key novelty of this formulation is that the smart sensor decides, at each discrete time instant, whether to transmit a quantized version of either its local state estimate or its local innovation. The objective is to design optimal transmission policies in order to minimize a long term average cost function as a convex combination of the receiver's expected estimation error covariance and the energy needed to transmit the packets. The optimal transmission policy is obtained by the use of dynamic programming techniques. Using the concept of submodularity, the optimality of a threshold policy in the case of scalar systems with perfect packet receipt acknowledgments is proved. Suboptimal solutions and their structural results are also discussed. Numerical results are presented illustrating the performance of the optimal and suboptimal transmission policies.Comment: Conditionally accepted in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network System

Rate-cost tradeoffs in control

Consider a distributed control problem with a communication channel connecting the observer of a linear stochastic system to the controller. The goal of the controller is minimize a quadratic cost function. The most basic special case of that cost function is the mean-square deviation of the system state from the desired state. We study the fundamental tradeoff between the communication rate r bits/sec and the limsup of the expected cost b, and show a lower bound on the rate necessary to attain b. The bound applies as long as the system noise has a probability density function. If target cost b is not too large, that bound can be closely approached by a simple lattice quantization scheme that only quantizes the innovation, that is, the difference between the controller's belief about the current state and the true state

Rate-Cost Tradeoffs in Control

Consider a control problem with a communication channel connecting the observer of a linear stochastic system to the controller. The goal of the controller is to minimize a quadratic cost function in the state variables and control signal, known as the linear quadratic regulator (LQR). We study the fundamental tradeoff between the communication rate r bits/sec and the expected cost b. We obtain a lower bound on a certain rate-cost function, which quantifies the minimum directed mutual information between the channel input and output that is compatible with a target LQR cost. The rate-cost function has operational significance in multiple scenarios of interest: among others, it allows us to lower-bound the minimum communication rate for fixed and variable length quantization, and for control over noisy channels. We derive an explicit lower bound to the rate-cost function, which applies to the vector, non-Gaussian, and partially observed systems, thereby extending and generalizing an earlier explicit expression for the scalar Gaussian system, due to Tatikonda el al. [2]. The bound applies as long as the differential entropy of the system noise is not −∞ . It can be closely approached by a simple lattice quantization scheme that only quantizes the innovation, that is, the difference between the controller's belief about the current state and the true state. Via a separation principle between control and communication, similar results hold for causal lossy compression of additive noise Markov sources. Apart from standard dynamic programming arguments, our technical approach leverages the Shannon lower bound, develops new estimates for data compression with coding memory, and uses some recent results on high resolution variablelength vector quantization to prove that the new converse bounds are tight

Quantized H-Infinity control for nonlinear stochastic time-delay systems with missing measurements

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 IEEEIn this paper, the quantized H∞ control problem is investigated for a class of nonlinear stochastic time-delay network-based systems with probabilistic data missing. A nonlinear stochastic system with state delays is employed to model the networked control systems where the measured output and the input signals are quantized by two logarithmic quantizers, respectively. Moreover, the data missing phenomena are modeled by introducing a diagonal matrix composed of Bernoulli distributed stochastic variables taking values of 1 and 0, which describes that the data from different sensors may be lost with different missing probabilities. Subsequently, a sufficient condition is first derived in virtue of the method of sector-bounded uncertainties, which guarantees that the closed-loop system is stochastically stable and the controlled output satisfies H∞ performance constraint for all nonzero exogenous disturbances under the zero-initial condition. Then, the sufficient condition is decoupled into some inequalities for the convenience of practical verification. Based on that, quantized H∞ controllers are designed successfully for some special classes of nonlinear stochastic time-delay systems by using Matlab linear matrix inequality toolbox. Finally, a numerical simulation example is exploited to show the effectiveness and applicability of the results derived.This work was supported in part by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the U.K. under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Leverhulme Trust of the U.K., the Royal Society of the U.K., the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61028008, 61134009, 61104125, 60974030, and 61074016, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany