Distributed control applications within sensor networks

Sensor networks are gaining a central role in the research community. This paper addresses some of the issues arising from the use of sensor networks in control applications. Classical control theory proves to be insufficient in modeling distributed control problems where issues of communication delay, jitter, and time synchronization between components are not negligible. After discussing our hardware and software platform and our target application, we review useful models of computation and then suggest a mixed model for design, analysis, and synthesis of control algorithms within sensor networks. We present a hierarchical model composed of continuous time-trigger components at the low level and discrete event-triggered components at the high level.