Editorial Sensor/Actuator Networks and Networked Control ...downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/805380.pdf · backbone construction for optimal routing in wireless sensor networks,

EditorialSensor/Actuator Networks and Networked Control Systems

Ge Guo,1 Xin Wang,2 Linying Xiang,3 and Fuzhong Nian4

1 School of Information Science and Technology, Dalian Maritime University, Dalian 116026, China2 School of Electronic, Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200240, China3Department of Automation, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361005, China4 School of Computer and Communication, Lanzhou University of Technology, Lanzhou 730080, China

Correspondence should be addressed to Ge Guo; [email protected]

Received 12 August 2014; Accepted 12 August 2014; Published 27 August 2014

Copyright © 2014 Ge Guo et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, whichpermits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

The last two decades have witnessed a great deal of interestsin sensor/actuator networks (SANs), or, generally, networkedcontrol systems (NCSs). Compared to conventional systemarchitectures, NCSs have numerous advantages such asreduced systemwiring, being easier for design, diagnosis, andmaintenance, lower cost, and increased flexibility, reliability,and safety. As a result, NCSs have been widely applied tomany areas, for example, automobiles, aircrafts, and space-crafts, autonomous vehicles, transportation systems, powersystems, remote monitoring and data acquisition systems,chemical processes, and many manufacturing plants.

Research on NCSs has heretofore focused mainly on sev-eral basic communication constraints that can cause perfor-mance degradation or stability loss, such as network-induceddelays, packet dropouts, data corruptions or disordering, anddata rate limitation and quantization effects. Medium accessconstraint is another important issue worthy of intensiveinvestigation, which refers to the fact that the network cannotaccommodate all the nodes (sensors, actuators, subsystems,etc.) simultaneously at any time. There are other open issuesawaiting investigation, too.

As a special type of NCSs, sensor/actuators networkstypically have a large number of devices advanced in sensing,communicational, computational, and mobility capabilities,demanding nontrivial energy. In addition, the batteries pow-ering these devices have limited capacity and cannot bereplaced or recharged conveniently. As a consequence, many

interesting and challenging issues are open, for example,localization, coverage and routing of mobile sensor/actuatornetworks, and so forth.

The special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art researchand development in the analysis and design for networkedcontrol systems as well as the theoretical and technologicaladvances in sensor and actuator networks. The intention ofthis special issue was to provide for researchers a forumto share their latest research results on filtering, estimation,control, and other aspects in sensor/actuator networks andnetworked control systems and for readers an opportunityto have an overview of the latest achievements about someinteresting issues this field has been encountering.

In the next section, we give a brief description of thepapers in this special issue.

2. An Overview of the Special Issue

This special issue comprises twenty-six papers, which arecarefully selected from many submissions by a rigorous peerreview process. Roughly, the articles in this special issue canbe classified into three topics: control and estimation ofNCSs,corporative control and filtering of multiagent systems, andtheoretical and practical issues in sensor and networks.

Falling within the topic area of control and estima-tion of networked systems are seven papers, dealing withstabilization or estimation problems of systems subject toconstraints like delay, dropout, and quantization, including

Hindawi Publishing CorporationMathematical Problems in EngineeringVolume 2014, Article ID 805380, 3 pageshttp://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/805380

2 Mathematical Problems in Engineering

applications in various industrial fields. To name some, thepaper entitled “𝐻

∞guaranteed cost control for networked

control systems under scheduling policy based on predictederror,” by Q. Zhu et al., studies scheduling policy based onmodel prediction errors with the aim of reducing energyconsumption and network conflicts at the actuator node.Theactuator nodes are assumed to have limited energy and highcollision probability and the sensor nodes are responsible forstate prediction based on a model. The transmission controlstrategy is an essentially event-triggered one; that is, thecontrol signal is transmitted only when the prediction errorviolates a threshold set by the controller. The design methodof the guaranteed cost controller is presented by consideringparameter uncertainty and long-time delay.

Another interesting paper on this topic is “Control andoptimization of network in networked control system,” byZ. Wang and H. Sun, which investigates the relationshipbetween quality of performance (QoP) of control systems andquality of service (QoS) of the communication network. Itpresents an idea to avoid network congestion from the viewpoint of control theory, which marks the departure of thiswork from the existing results. Specifically, the congestionand bandwidth are regarded as the state and control variables,respectively. Using these variables, a linear time-invariantsystem model is established to describe the connectionbetween the congestion state and the network bandwidth. Alinear quadratic method is introduced to eliminate networkcongestion by allocating bandwidth dynamically.

On the other hand, a couple of papers focus on thestate estimation and filtering problems in NCSs or SANs. In“Distributed 𝐻

∞sampled-data filtering over sensor networks

with Markovian switching topologies,” by B. Yang et al., a dis-tributed sampled-data filtering problem is studied for sensornetworks with stochastic switching topologies and transmis-sion delay. The network topology switching is triggered by aMarkov chain. A distributed filter structure is given, in whicheach sensor has access to the measurement of its neighbornodes. The distributed sampled-data filtering problem istransformed into the stability problem of a Markovian jumperror system. Then, in the context of mean-square stabilityanalysis and using Lyapunov-Krasovskii method, a topology-dependent sampled-data filtering method is obtained.

Along this line, there is another paper “Variance-constrained robust estimation for discrete-time systems withcommunication constraints,” by B. Wang et al., which isconcerned with the filtering problem in NCSs subject tomeasurement quantization, random transmission delay, andpackets loss. The aim of this paper is to design a linear filtersuch that, for all the communication constraints, the errorstate of the filter ismean-square bounded and the steady-statevariance of the estimation error of each state variable is nolarger than a prescribed bound.

Another topic of this special issue regards theoreticaldevelopments in multiagent systems, with the emphasis onconsensus control and consensus filtering problems. Thereare in total four papers on this topic, focusing, respec-tively, on latest advances in cooperative filtering, controland tracking of multiagent systems, and application to anextrusionmachine producing process. In “Consensus tracking

of multiagent systems with time-varying reference state andexogenous disturbances,” by H. Yang et al., tracking controlof multiagent systems is studied. A path following algo-rithm with a time-varying reference state is proposed, andthe path tracking performance of multiagent systems withexogenous disturbances is analyzed. A disturbance observer-based control method is developed, which can guaranteeasymptotical consensus of multiagent systems under eitherfixed or switching topologies, regardless of the time-varyingreference state and the exogenous disturbance.

Dr. Y. Liu et al. contributed a noteworthy work “Dis-tributed Kalman-consensus filtering for sparse signal estima-tion,” which presents a Kalman filtering-based distributedalgorithm for sparse signal estimation.The authors suggesteda rebuilt pseudomeasurement-embedded Kalman filter inthe form of information set and an improved parameterselection approach. By introducing the pseudomeasurementtechnique into the Kalman-consensus filtering problem, adistributed estimation algorithm is developed, which fusesthe measurements from different nodes in the network andhence renders all filters to reach a consensus on the estimateof the sparse signals.

Furthermore, we have seven papers studying a varietyof theoretic issues in sensor and actuator networks (includ-ing general complex networks) and eight papers discussingvarious applications. To save space, here, we just mention afew of them. For instance, in “Energy efficient low-cost virtualbackbone construction for optimal routing in wireless sensornetworks,” by K. M. Pitchai and B. Paramasivan, an efficientweighted connected dominating sets (CDS) algorithm ispresented for constructing a low-cost virtual backbone withhop spanning ratio and minimum number of dominators.The approach has three phases, with the initial phase revokinga partial CDS tree from a complete CDS tree and the secondandfinal phases giving theCDS algorithmby determining thedominators using an iteration process.

K. Zhao et al. proposed in “Cooperative transmission inmobile wireless sensor networks withmultiple carrier frequencyoffsets: a double-differential approach” a relay selection-based double-differential cooperative transmission scheme,in which the best relay sensor node is selected to forwardthe source sensor node’s signals to the destination nodewith the detect-and-forward (DetF) protocol. Assuming aRayleigh fading environment, the closed-form expressionsfor the outage probability and average bit error rate of thescheme are first derived.Then, expressions for the asymptoticoutage probability and the average bit error rate for largesignal-to-noise ratio (SNR) are presented. Finally, a simpleanalytical solution to the optimal power allocation problemis obtained by minimizing the average bit error rate.

As transmission security issue is very important, in“Applying 3D polygonal mesh watermarking for transmissionsecurity protection through sensor networks,” Dr. R. Hu et al.discussed the problem of copyright protection and digitalright management. In this paper, a blind watermarkingalgorithm is proposed for security protection in transmit-ting 3D polygonal meshes through sensor networks. Thepresented method is based on selecting prominent featurevertices (prongs) on the mesh and then embedding the same

Mathematical Problems in Engineering 3

watermark into their neighborhood regions. The embeddingalgorithm is based on modifying the distribution of vertexnorms by using quadratic programming. Decoding resultsare obtained by a majority voting scheme over neighborhoodregions of the prongs. In situations where cropping cannotremove all prongs, robustness against the cropping attack canbe achieved both theoretically and experimentally, showingthat the results provide a solution for 3D polygonal water-marking potential to withstand a variety of attacks.

3. Concluding Remarks

Due to space limitation, we cannot introduce all the papersin this special issue one by one with more details. However,we do hope that this special issue contains useful informationthat can help motivate more researchers to contribute to thisfascinating area.

Acknowledgments

We appreciate all reviewers who dedicated their time andeffort to perform review of all the submitted papers andprovided valuable suggestions to the authors.

Ge GuoXin Wang

Linying XiangFuzhong Nian

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Editorial Sensor/Actuator Networks and Networked Control ...downloads.hindawi.com/journals/mpe/2014/805380.pdf · backbone construction for optimal routing in wireless sensor networks,