Control System-Oriented MIMO Over-the-Air Computing

This paper applies the MIMO over-the-air computation (MIMO-AirComp) technique to compute the control signal of a distributed control system, including state estimation. The control-based target function is expressed as a nomographic function and efficiently computed through the wireless channel with suitable function decomposition. The proposed scheme leverages local pre-processing at the individual sensor, aggregation through the multiple access channel, and post-processing at the controller to compute the control-oriented nomographic function. We analyze the performance of our proposed scheme in terms of the time delay and computation error compared to a state-of-the-art MIMO time-division multiple access scheme by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Numerical results indicate that the proposed scheme considerably improves control performance, particularly in noisy networks that rely on a large number of wireless sensors, with low complexity for resource-constrained scenarios.