Stability and H_infinity Performance Preserving Scheduling Policy for Networked Control Systems

In this paper, the exponential stability and the L_2 induced gain performance are investigated for a collection of plants whose feedback control loops are closed via a shared network link. Due to a limited communication capacity, the network link can only close one feedback control loop at a time, while the other control loops are assumed to be open-loop. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully allocate the communication resources in order to guarantee exponential stability and achieve desired H_infinity performance of the whole networked control systems. In this paper, we derive a condition for scheduling the network so that all the plants achieve the exponential stability and some reasonable H_infinity disturbance attenuation levels. The proof is constructive. A time-division based scheduling policy is proposed to guarantee the exponential stability and a weighted H_infinityperformance. The techniques used in this paper are based on the average dwell time approach incorporated with piecewise quadratic Lyapunov-like functions.