Information Age-Controllability Trade-offs in Communication-Constrained Networks
For designers of wireless networked control systems, this work provides a framework to jointly optimize control performance and age of information, though the results are incremental and domain-specific.
The paper studies the trade-off between controllability and information freshness in wireless control networks, deriving closed-form expressions for key metrics and proposing adaptive access policies that balance these objectives. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.
We investigate the trade-off between controllability, channel access, and age-related performance in a wireless network of control systems. Controllers share a random-access channel to transmit control inputs to actuators over slotted blocks. We measure reliable control via block controllability, where a block is controllable if it contains a required number of consecutive successful transmissions. In parallel, we capture information freshness via the age of information. To enable efficient allocation of channel resources over time, we introduce adaptive access probabilities at the block level, prioritizing controllers that have not yet achieved controllability. We then derive closed-form expressions for block controllability probability, the peak latency between inter-block consecutive successes, and peak age of information. We further characterize the peak control latency, defined as the time between consecutive controllable blocks. Finally, we optimize access probabilities to jointly balance controllability and age-related metrics. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive access policies in managing this trade-off in interference-limited wireless control networks.