Communication-control co-design for closed-loop metaverse

In the context of the metaverse, a wireless networked control system (WNCS) enables dynamic and interactive experiences by ensuring that the virtual environment can react and adapt in real time based on user inputs or predefined control procedures. Therefore, the need for efficient communication and control mechanisms becomes crucial for WNCS. In this chapter, we focus on communicationcontrol co-design for WNCS to guarantee seamless user experiences in the metaverse. Specifically, we first consider a single-loop WNCS and investigate the peak age of loop (PAoL) performances, including the average, variance, and outage probability of the PAoL. A PAoL-oriented communication-control co-design is proposed via an effective blocklength adaptation with a retransmission scheme and an optimal linear-quadratic regulator control design. That shows an up to 8-fold reduction in the average control cost over the uplink only and downlink only optimization schemes and up to 80-fold reduction in outage probability of control. To reduce wireless resource consumption while maintaining control stability, we further investigate the wireless networked predictive control for multi-loop WNCS. In each control cycle, only part of the control devices is permitted to transmit their state information to the centralized controller, while the centralized controller predicts the state information of the rest unscheduled control devices via the Gaussian process regression method. The joint predictive communication-control optimization scheduling algorithm with fuzzy logic is proposed to minimize both the control cost and communication cost. Numerical results show that the proposed method enables a more stable WNCS with fewer wireless resources.