Fault Tolerant Control of Multi-Hop Control Networks

A multi-hop control network (MCN) consists of a plant where the communication between sensors, actuators, and computational units is supported by a (wireless) multi-hop communication network, and data flow is performed using scheduling and routing of sensing and actuation data. We address the control design problem on a MCN where the plant is a SISO LTI system and links are subject to permanent failures. We first characterize controllability and observability of a MCN: we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the plant dynamics and on the communication scheduling, and we provide a design methodology to satisfy such conditions for any failure configuration. Then we address the problem of detecting the failure of links of the radio connectivity graph: we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the plant dynamics and on the communication protocol, and we provide a design methodology to satisfy the above conditions.