DTS: Dynamic TDMA Scheduling for Networked Control Systems

Networked Control Systems (NCSs) are pervasively applied in modern industry. With increasing functionalities, modern NCSs tend to have dynamic workload by holding a variety of applications via a shared network. To handle workload variations and provide performance guarantees, dynamic network scheduling scheme is highly desired in NCSs. In this paper, we propose a network scheduling scheme, referred to as DTS, that can make on-the-fly decisions to schedule the applications in NCSs. DTS aims at NCSs that use time-triggered network as shared medium and Time division multiple access (TDMA) as network access method. DTS dynamically changes the network accessing sequence of the applications in a way to provide optimal system performance and maintain control stability in NCSs. DTS adopts a decentralized schedule mechanism where each application can make its local schedule decision, enhancing the scalability of NCSs. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme by improving the network bandwidth and providing better system performance in NCS comparing with the existing time-triggered scheduling schemes.