ABSTRACT

Rapid development in network technologies in the past few years has led to a revolution in engineering practices. Using a network as the basement of a feedback control loop is now widely applied in various types of engineering programs, which has gained a great deal of research interest. The usage of networks in control systems has many advantages such as low cost, reduced weight and simple installation, as well as some limitations including networkinduced time-delays (also called communication delays) and data package loss caused mainly by complex working conditions and limited bandwidth. As a result, most of the literature on network systems has focused on how to eliminate or compensate for the effect caused by communication delays and data package loss. Many researchers have studied the stability and controller design problems for networked systems in the presence of deterministic communication delays. Recently, due to the fact that such kinds of time-delays usually appear in a random and time-varying fashion, the communication delays have been modeled in various probabilistic ways.