Analysis and synthesis of networked control systems: A survey of recent advances and challenges

A networked control system (NCS) is a control system which involves a communication network. In NCSs, the continuous-time measurement is usually sampled and quantized before transmission. Then, the measurement is transmitted to the remote controller via the communication channel, during which the signal may be delayed, lost or even sometimes not allowed for transmission due to the communication or energy constraints. In recent years, the modeling, analysis and synthesis of networked control systems (NCSs) have received great attention, which leads to a large number of publications. This paper attempts to present an overview of recent advances and unify them in a framework of network-induced issues such as signal sampling, data quantization, communication delay, packet dropouts, medium access constraints, channel fading and power constraint, and present respective solution approaches to each of these issues. We draw some conclusions and highlight future research directions in end.