Modeling and Analysis for Joint Design of Communication and Control
2026-04-09 • Information Theory
Information Theory
AI summaryⓘ
The authors propose a unified method to design systems where communication and control work together, focusing on two key measures: how long communication takes and how stable the control system is. They identify the best balance between these factors using a concept called the Pareto boundary. The authors also create formulas to evaluate system reliability, considering when communication or control might fail, and introduce a combined failure probability. Their results show this trade-off and reliability depend on how well communication and control loops are integrated.
Joint design of communication and control (JDCC)Communication transmission delaySteady-state control variancePareto boundaryMaximum-ratio transmission (MRT)Zero-forcing (ZF) beamformingOutage probabilityClosed-loop controlPerformance trade-off
Authors
Xu Gan, Chongjun Ouyang, Yuanwei Liu
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.