Modeling and Analysis for Joint Design of Communication and Control

Abstract

A unified analytical framework for joint design of communication and control (JDCC) is proposed. Within this framework, communication transmission delay and steady-state control variance are derived as the two fundamental JDCC performance metrics. The Pareto boundary is then established to characterize the optimal communication-control trade-off in JDCC systems. To further obtain closed-form expressions, their performance regions are derived under maximum-ratio transmission (MRT) and zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming. For system reliability evaluation, the communication-only and control-only outage probabilities are first derived. Based on these, the JDCC outage probability is defined to quantify the probability that the communication-delay and control-error requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. Its analytical expressions are then derived under both MRT and ZF schemes. Finally, numerical results validate the theoretical results and reveal that: (1) the Pareto boundary characterizes the trade-off frontier and performance limit of JDCC systems and (2) the JDCC reliability is jointly determined by the uplink-downlink closed-loop control and its coupling with communication.