Communication Schemes for Centralized and Decentralized Event-Triggered Control Systems

Energy constraint long-range wireless sensor/actuator-based solutions are theoretically the perfect choice to support the next generation of city-scale cyber-physical systems. Traditional systems adopt periodic control which increases network congestion and actuations while burdens the energy consumption. Recent control theory studies overcome these problems by introducing aperiodic strategies, such as event-triggered control (ETC). In spite of the potential savings, these strategies assume actuator continuous listening, while ignoring the sensing energy costs. In this paper, we fill this gap, by enabling sensing and actuator listening duty cycling and proposing two innovative medium access control protocols for three decentralized ETC approaches. A laboratory experimental test bed, which emulates a smart water network, was modeled and extended to evaluate the impact of system parameters and the performance of each approach. Experimental results reveal the predominance of the decentralized ETC against the classic periodic control either in terms of communication or actuation by promising significant system lifetime extension.