Modulation-Free M2M Communications for Mission-Critical Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a mission-critical control system, where an unstable dynamic plant is monitored by a number of distributed sensors. We propose a novel <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">contention-free</i> machine-to-machine (M2M) communication protocol for mission-critical control applications. Using modulation-free transmission, the proposed solution fundamentally exploits the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">additive properties</i> of the physical wireless channel. In contrast to all the existing digital-based M2M communications that avoid collision between the multiple sensors, the proposed protocol utilizes collision to enhance the system performance. Using the Lyapunov drift analysis approach, we further establish closed-form sufficient requirements on the communication resources needed to achieve stabilization of the mission-critical control system. The proposed scheme is also compared with various baselines and we show that significant performance gains can be achieved.