Towards Semantic-Aware Transport Layer Protocols: A Control Performance Perspective

Abstract: Networked control systems (NCSs) are an example of task-oriented communication systems, where the purpose of communication is real-time control of processes over a network. In the context of NCSs, with the processes sending their state measurements to the remote controllers, the deterioration of control performance due to the network congestion can be partly mitigated by shaping the traffic injected into the network at the transport layer (TL). In this work, we conduct an extensive performance evaluation of selected TL protocols and show that existing approaches from communication and control theories fail to deliver sufficient control performance in realistic network scenarios. Moreover, we propose a new semantic-aware TL policy, which uses the process state information to filter the most relevant updates and the network state information to prevent delays due to network congestion. The proposed mechanism is shown to outperform all the considered TL protocols with respect to control performance.