Intelligent Control Systems Article 2019

Resource-aware IoT Control: Saving Communication through Predictive Triggering

Trimpe2019resource image

The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects multiple physical devices in large-scale networks. When the 'things' coordinate decisions and act collectively on shared information, feedback is introduced between them. Multiple feedback loops are thus closed over a shared, general-purpose network. Traditional feedback control is unsuitable for design of IoT control because it relies on high-rate periodic communication and is ignorant of the shared network resource. Therefore, recent event-based estimation methods are applied herein for resource-aware IoT control allowing agents to decide online whether communication with other agents is needed, or not. While this can reduce network traffic significantly, a severe limitation of typical event-based approaches is the need for instantaneous triggering decisions that leave no time to reallocate freed resources (e.g., communication slots), which hence remain unused. To address this problem, novel predictive and self triggering protocols are proposed herein. From a unified Bayesian decision framework, two schemes are developed: self triggers that predict, at the current triggering instant, the next one; and predictive triggers that check at every time step, whether communication will be needed at a given prediction horizon. The suitability of these triggers for feedback control is demonstrated in hardware experiments on a cart-pole, and scalability is discussed with a multi-vehicle simulation.

Author(s): Sebastian Trimpe and Dominik Baumann
Journal: IEEE Internet of Things Journal
Volume: 6
Number (issue): 3
Pages: 5013-5028
Year: 2019
Month: June
Bibtex Type: Article (article)
DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2894628
State: Published
Electronic Archiving: grant_archive
Links:

BibTex

@article{trimpe2019resource,
  title = {Resource-aware IoT Control: Saving Communication through Predictive Triggering},
  journal = {IEEE Internet of Things Journal},
  abstract = {The Internet of Things (IoT) interconnects multiple physical devices in large-scale networks. When the 'things' coordinate decisions and act collectively on shared information, feedback is introduced between them. Multiple feedback loops are thus closed over a shared, general-purpose network. Traditional feedback control is unsuitable for design of IoT control because it relies on high-rate periodic communication and is ignorant of the shared network resource. Therefore, recent event-based estimation methods are applied herein for resource-aware IoT control allowing agents to decide online whether communication with other agents is needed, or not. While this can reduce network traffic significantly, a severe limitation of typical event-based approaches is the need for instantaneous triggering decisions that leave no time to reallocate freed resources (e.g., communication slots), which hence remain unused. To address this problem, novel predictive and self triggering protocols are proposed herein. From a unified Bayesian decision framework, two schemes are developed: self triggers that predict, at the current triggering instant, the next one; and predictive triggers that check at every time step, whether communication will be needed at a given prediction horizon. The suitability of these triggers for feedback control is demonstrated in hardware experiments on a cart-pole, and scalability is discussed with a multi-vehicle simulation.
  },
  volume = {6},
  number = {3},
  pages = {5013-5028},
  month = jun,
  year = {2019},
  slug = {trimpe2019resource},
  author = {Trimpe, Sebastian and Baumann, Dominik},
  month_numeric = {6}
}