A Timer-Based Distributed Channel Access Mechanism in Networked Control Systems

We consider a system consisting of multiple heterogeneous control subsystems sharing a common communication resource for accomplishing their control tasks. Despite the numerous advantages that such networked control systems (NCSs) offer, their implementation is limited in practice due to the limited communication resources. We propose a novel distributed approach for the resource allocation problem in NCSs by which the subsystems can coordinate to access the network. More specifically, we develop a deterministic distributed scheme with which the subsystem with the highest cost is selected, based only on local information without requiring explicit communication between the subsystems. The efficiency of our scheme is demonstrated via simulations and it is compared with a centralized approach and other relevant approaches.