Network Functional Compression for Control Applications

The trend of future communication systems is to aim for the steering and control of cyber-physical systems. These systems can quickly become congested in environments like those presented in Industry 4.0. In these scenarios, a plethora of sensor data is transmitted wirelessly to multiple in-network controllers that compute the control functions of the cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we show an implementation of network Functional Compression (FC) as a proof of concept to drastically reduce the data traffic in these scenarios. FC is a form of goal-oriented communication scheme in which the objective of the sender-receiver pair is to transmit the minimum amount of information to compute a function at the receiver end. In our scenario, the senders transmit an encoded and compressed version of the sensor data to a destination, an in-network controller interested in computing as its target function, a proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller. We show that it is possible to achieve compression rates of over 50% in some cases by employing FC. We also show that using FC in a distributed cascade fashion can achieve more significant compression rates while reducing computational costs.