Potential gains of communication-compute-control co-design based performance optimization methods in cyber-physical systems

Abstract: In this paper we propose and quantitatively evaluate three performance optimization methods that exploit the concept of communication-compute-control co-design by introducing awareness of communication and compute characteristics into the application logic in different ways to improve overall system performance. We have implemented a closed-loop control of a robotic arm over a wireless network where the controller is deployed into an edge cloud environment. When implementing an industrial system that leverages network and cloud technologies, the level of determinism of the control application can be decreased by nature. This means that some imperfections may be introduced into the control system, and the closed-loop control in substance changes to open-loop during disturbances. We aim to improve the performance of these open-loop control periods by applying methods that can compensate for the imperfections statistically or in a guaranteed way. We demonstrate that co-design-based application improvements with minimal dependencies on the underlying technologies can already yield an order of magnitude gain when it comes to the accurate execution of the robot trajectories during the openloop control periods. Furthermore, by combining the proposed methods, the performance improvements add up and can produce up to 45% shorter trajectory executions compared to individual evaluations.