Joint Resource Allocation and Controller Selection for Communication and Control Co-Design

In this paper, we introduce a novel co-design strategy that jointly optimizes wireless resource allocation and controller selection for networked control systems under strict reliability and latency constraints. We aim to minimize the total system power consumption, comprising computation and transmission power, while ensuring desired control performance. To achieve this, we leverage refined finite blocklength (FBL) communication models to accurately capture short-packet transmission rates and integrate these with a multi-controller architecture that offers a variety of controllers with different reliability and computational demands. We formulate the joint resource allocation and controller scheduling problem as a mixed integer non-linear program (MINLP), which is non-convex and challenging to solve optimally. To address the computational complexity, we propose a low-complexity iterative algorithm that decomposes the original problem into two sub-problems: adaptive controller selection and optimal channel assignment. Simulation results show that the proposed method reduces the overall power consumption compared to conventional baseline strategies while satisfying both communication and control performance requirements.