When MIMO Control Meets MIMO Communication: A Majorization Condition for Networked Stabilizability

In this paper, we initiate the study of networked stabilization via a MIMO communication scheme between the controller and the plant. Specifically, the communication system is modeled as a MIMO transceiver, which consists of three parts: an encoder, a MIMO channel, and a decoder. In the spirit of MIMO communication, the number of SISO subchannels in the transceiver is often greater than the number of data streams to be transmitted. Moreover, the subchannel capacities are assumed to be fixed a priori. In this case, the encoder/decoder pair gives an additional design freedom on top of the controller, leading to a stabilization problem via coding/control co-design. It turns out that how to take the best advantage of the coding mechanism is quite crucial. From a demand/supply perspective, the design of the coding mechanism boils down to reshaping the demands for communication resource from different control inputs to match the given supplies. We study the problem for the case of AWGN subchannels and fading subchannels, respectively. In both cases, we arrive at a unified necessary and sufficient condition on the capacities of the subchannels under which the coding/control co-design problem is solvable. The condition is given in terms of a majorization type relation. As we go along, systematic procedures are also put forward to implement the coding/control co-design. A numerical example is presented to illustrate our results.