Stochastic Channel Allocation for Nonlinear Systems with Markovian Packet Dropout

This paper addresses a channel scheduling problem for group of dynamically decoupled nonlinear subsystems with actuators connected through digital communication channels and controlled by a centralized controller. Due to the limited communication capacity, only one channel can be activated and hence there is only one pair of sensor and actuator can communicate with the controller at each time instant. In addition, the communication channels are not reliable so Markovian packed dropout is introduced. A predictive control framework is adopted for controller/scheduler co-design to alleviate the performance loss caused by the limited communication capacity. Instead of sending a single control value, the controller sends a sequence of predicted control values to a selected actuator so that there are control input candidates which can be fed to the subsystem when the actuator does not communicate with the controller. A stochastic algorithm is proposed to schedule the usage of the communication medium and sufficient conditions on stochastic stability are given under some mild assumptions.