Optimal Control Design for Perturbed Constrained Networked Control Systems

This letter focuses on an optimal control design problem for a class of perturbed networked control systems where a number of systems, subject to state and input constraints, share a communication network with limited bandwidth. We first formulate an optimal control design problem with a constant feedback gain in order to minimize the communication demand for each system while guaranteeing satisfaction of state and input constraints; we show that this optimization problem is very hard to solve. Then, we formulate the same optimal control design problem with a non-constant feedback gain; we argue that this problem is less difficult and results in a lower, or equal, communication demand in comparison to the design with the constant feedback gain. We illustrate and compare these optimal control designs by a simple example.