On the Optimization of the Transport Layer for Networked Control Systems

Recent publications showed that packet loss significantly reduces the performance of Networked Control Systems (NCS). One approach to increase the reliability of the communication system is to retransmit lost packets. Obviously, such retransmissions take time and thus require to increase the sampling time, what generally degrades the performance. Thus, we raise the question whether it is worth to increase the sampling time to allow more packet transmissions per sampling interval. To answer this question, we present and analyze four different configurations of the transport layer. Finally, with the help of three simple examples, we show that the control performance can be improved by a proper design of the transport layer.