Control Communication Co-Design for Wide Area Cyber-Physical Systems

Wide Area Cyber-Physical Systems (WA-CPSs) are a class of control systems that integrate low-powered sensors, heterogeneous actuators, and computer controllers into large infrastructure that span multi-kilometre distances. Current wireless communication technologies are incapable of meeting the communication requirements of range and bounded delays needed for the control of WA-CPSs. To solve this problem, we use a Control Communication Co-design approach for WA-CPSs, that we refer to as the C3 approach, to design a novel Low-Power Wide Area (LPWA) MAC protocol called Ctrl-MAC and its associated event-triggered controller that can guarantee the closed-loop stability of a WA-CPS. This is the first article to show that LPWA wireless communication technologies can support the control of WA-CPSs. LPWA technologies are designed to support one-way communication for monitoring and are not appropriate for control. We present this work using an example of a water distribution network application, which we evaluate both through a co-simulator (modeling both physical and cyber subsystems) and testbed deployments. Our evaluation demonstrates full control stability, with up to 50% better packet delivery ratios and 80% less average end-to-end delays when compared to a state-of-the-art LPWA technology. We also evaluate our scheme against an idealised, wired, centralised, control architecture, and show that the controller maintains stability and the overshoots remain within bounds.