ABSTRACT

This chapter addresses the implementation of controllers in which the updates of the control action are event triggered. It explores some naive communication protocols that are used, together with a realistic model of energy consumption on wireless sensor networks, to assess the energy usage of the several types of implementations. The chapter discusses architectures in which the sensors providing measurements to the controller are not collocated. It considers monitoring the triggering conditions is either unfeasible or requires a prohibitive amount of communication exchange between the different sensors and the controller. The chapter presents a decentralized strategy aimed at the reduction of message transmissions in the network. It also discusses briefly strategies that could be employed to reduce the amount of time that the different nodes of the implementation need to spend listening for messages from other nodes. The chapter focuses on designing an appropriate triggering mechanism for the communication from controller to sensors.