Efficient LQG control for wireless networked control systems without packet acknowledgement

This paper studies the linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) control problem for wireless networked control systems (WNCSs) without packet acknowledgement. In WNCSs, packets may be randomly lost in both control and observation channels, and non-acknowledgement (non-ACK) mechanisms (e.g. UDP-like protocols) are generally adopted to achieve real-time control and reduce energy consumption. For general non-ACK systems, it is well known that the optimal controller is not yet available, and the performance of existing suboptimal controllers is poor because they either adopt a fixed control law or rely on a poorly performing filter. By using a moment-preserving Gaussian approximation approach, an efficient filter is proposed to approximately estimate system states. Based on the approximate state estimates of the proposed filter, an approximate optimal controller with a time-varying control gain for WNCSs is further designed by using a dynamic programming approach. The proposed controller has excellent performance and becomes the optimal controller under special system parameters. Numerical simulations show the correctness and effectiveness of the obtained results.