Delay Tolerant Behavior Control based Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation for Unmanned Ground Vehicles in a Network Control System

Abstract

OJHA, UNNATI. Delay Tolerant Behavior Control based Adaptive Bandwidth Allocation for Unmanned Ground Vehicles in a Network Control System. (Under the direction of Dr. Mo-Yuen Chow)

The rapid growth of wired as well as wireless communication technology has led to the expansion of Network Control System (NCS) into Large Scale Distributed Network Control System. As the size of NCSs increase, important resources like bandwidth become scarce which degrade the performance of the NCS. It is necessary to manage the bandwidth in such a way that causes the least amount of degradation in the NCS performance. Many adaptive sampling methods have been suggested to meet the bandwidth constraint; however, efficiency of these methods decreases quickly as the amount of network delay increases. Delay in the network is unavoidable and stochastic thus it is important that a bandwidth management technique be robust to delays in order to maintain the performance of the NCS. This study proposes a Delay Tolerant Behavior Control (DTBC) based bandwidth allocation that is robust to network delays. This new method for bandwidth allocation in a system of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) is inspired by the human driving behavior. In DTBC, bandwidth is allocated based on the UGV trajectory curvature, amount of network delay and the velocity of the UGV. A study is first presented to analyze the relationship between curvature and the UGV performance. The Behavior Control (BC) based bandwidth allocation algorithm, a predecessor of DTBC is then formulated. The BC algorithm is then expanded and improvised to formulate the DTBC algorithm. Both simulation and implementation results are presented at the end which confirms that DTBCs performance is superior to the existing algorithms especially in the presence of network delay.