ABSTRACT
A Network Control Systems (NCS) is a limited communication system. Limited communication systems arise because of the use of a finite bandwidth shared network to close the feedback loops of some systems. Tools from information theory have often been adopted to explore the issues of control under limited communication. Real-time communication is managed by the Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer of layer 2 of the Open System Interconnection model. There are two main, fundamentally different, communication paradigms: contention-based and contention-free MAC protocols. Scheduling methods for NCSs refer to those communication scheduling techniques that take into account the dynamics of the plant and its associated controller. Scheduling of communication in NCSs is more complex than the traditional task scheduling as it requires knowledge of the dynamics of the plant. The simplest open-loop communication policy is the Round Robin scheduling. Closed-loop scheduling methods use information about the plant and/or network to dynamically schedule the communication among nodes.
