Event-Triggered Transmission Policies for Nonlinear Control Systems Over Erasure Channels

We investigate the scenario where a controller communicates with a nonlinear plant via a wireless erasure channel. We present an event-based control strategy to stabilize the plant while sporadically using the unreliable wireless network. In particular, control packets may be lost at any time with a certain probability. Consequently, stability is ensured in a stochastic sense. We then compare the proposed event-based policy with a baseline policy that transmits according to the age of information, i.e., the time elapsed since the last successful reception. For any given baseline policy, we show how to design an event-based policy that ensures the same guaranteed control performance while leading, on average, to a strictly smaller channel utilization. Numerical simulations suggest that the achieved channel utilization may in fact be significantly smaller.