Wireless Digital Control of Continuous Passive Plants Over Token Ring Networks

In a recent paper we have shown how wave variables can be used to interconnect passive plants with passive controllers such that the system remains l-stable in spite of time varying delays and data dropouts. The present paper further enhances these results by providing a detailed model which captures time varying delays, data dropouts and network capacity for wireless ring token networks. It also provides a new theorem showing how an asynchronous controller can be implemented which maintains an l-stable system. Simulations, show that asynchronous control of a passive motor reduces the overall distortion when compared to a synchronous controller which relies on lossy data reduction techniques. These two distinct results pave the way to study high performance rate adaptive control schemes which minimize their control rate in order to match the network capacity. Copyright c © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.