• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.25 no.7
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• pp.986-992
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• 2021

To stabilize closed-loop wireless control systems, the state-of-the-art approach receives the individual sensor measurements at the controller and then sends the computed control signal to the actuators. We propose an over-the-air controller scheme where all sensors attached to the plant transmit scaled sensing signals simultaneously to the actuator, and the actuator then computes the feedback control signal by scaling the received signal. The over-the-air controller essentially adopts the over-the-air computation concept to compute the control signal for closed-loop wireless control systems. In contrast to the state-of-the-art sensor-to-controller and controller-to-actuator communication approach, the over-the-air controller exploits the superposition properties of multiple-access wireless channels to complete the communication and computation of a large number of sensing signals in a single communication resource unit. Therefore, the proposed scheme can obtain significant benefits in terms of low actuation delay and low resource utilization with a simple network architecture that does not require a dedicated controller.