An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network. Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing control-over-wireless solutions is limited as they cannot resolve overload situations in which the communication demand exceeds the available bandwidth. This paper presents a novel co-design of distributed control and wireless communication that overcomes this limitation by dynamically allocating the available bandwidth to agents with the greatest need to communicate. Experiments on a real cyber-physical testbed with 20 agents, each consisting of a wireless node and a cart-pole system, demonstrate that our solution achieves significantly better control performance under overload than the state of the art. We further prove that our co-design guarantees closed-loop stability for physical systems with stochastic linear time-invariant dynamics.

翻译：一个重要的网络物理系统类别依赖于多个代理商,它们通过协调无线网络的行动共同执行任务,例如智能运输中的自驾驶汽车和智能制造中的生产机器人。然而,现有无线控制解决方案的可扩缩性有限,因为它们无法解决通信需求超过现有带宽的超负荷情况。本文展示了分布式控制和无线通信的新颖共同设计,通过将可用带宽动态分配给最需要沟通的代理商克服了这一限制。在拥有20个代理商的真正网络物理测试台上进行的实验,每个测试台都由无线节点和木车极系统组成,表明我们的解决方案在超负荷情况下实现的超负荷控制性能要好得多。我们进一步证明,我们的共同设计保证了具有随机线性时变动态的物理系统闭路稳定。