Stability of Wireless and Wireline Networked Control Systems

This paper provides a general framework for analyzing the stability of general nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) with disturbances in the setting of L₏ stability. Our presentation provides sharper results for both L₏ gain and maximum allowable transfer interval (MATI) than previously obtainable and details the property of uniformly persistently exciting scheduling protocols. This class of protocols was shown to lead to L₏ stability for high enough transmission rates and were a natural property to demand, especially in the design of wireless scheduling protocols. The property is used directly in a novel proof technique based on the notions of vector comparison and (quasi) -monotone systems. We explore these results through analytical comparisons to those in the literature, as well as through simulations and numerical comparisons that verify that the uniform persistence of excitation property of protocols is, in some sense, the “finest” property that can be extracted from wireless scheduling protocols.