Event-Triggered Control in Shared Networks: How the Computational Power of Sensors Affects Transmission Priorities

In this paper, we study the prioritized transmission schemes for event-triggered wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) with smart (i.e., with computational power) or conventional (i.e., without computational power) sensors. When considering conventional sensors, the estimated state available to the controller is based on the intermittently received raw measurements. We show that the priority measure is associated with the statistical properties of the observations conforming with the cost of information loss (CoIL). Next, we consider the case of smart sensors, and despite the fact that CoIL can also be deployed, we deduce that it is more beneficial to use the available measurements as suggested by the value of information (VoI). The derived VoI incorporates the channel conditions and is compatible with distributed implementation. The impact of adopting each priority measure on the performance is evaluated via simulations.