Control-aware scheduling policies for energy harvesting sensors

In this paper, we study wireless networked control systems with energy harvesting sensors. Multiple sensors share a wireless medium over which they transmit measurements to their respective controllers, and due to the shared medium, packet collisions occur if sensors transmit simultaneously. To alleviate this problem, we propose random access policies that satisfy a desired control performance on each control loop, while also satisfying the energy constraints imposed by the energy harvesting process. The optimal scheduling policy is shown to follow a simple thresholding operation. Moreover, we provide a stochastic dual method for their computation, which is shown to be decoupled across sensors. Finally, we verify numerically
the properties of the proposed policy.