Preface
It is prohibitively difficult to introduce all the aspects of a cyber physical system (CPS), since it consists of many technologies such as computing, control and communications, and concerns both theoretical elements such as information theory in the context of control and practical issues such as software or hardware design. In this book, I focus only on the interplay of communications and control in CPSs, in particular how to design a communication system for the purpose of control, from the viewpoint of a communications engineer or scientist. Of course this does not mean that this book will benefit only the communications community. Experts on controls or computing, theorists or practical engineers may find interesting points in this book since it is a multidisciplinary subject.
This book consists of two parts. In the first part, which is composed of the first four chapters, the basics about CPS, communications, and control are briefly introduced. By reading through these four chapters, working knowledge can be acquired for readers unfamiliar with both communications and control. Then, the second part (the remaining four chapters), which is the main part of this book, explains various aspects of communication design for controlling CPSs, namely the capacity requirements, network topology design, networking, and physical layer design. These subjects are discussed specifically in the context of smart grids, using illustrated examples.
The writing of this book and many research results of mine incorporated in this book were supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants CNS-1239366, ECCS-1407679, CNS-1525418, and CNS-1543830. I sincerely thank the NSF for this generous support. I also sincerely thank my colleagues, Prof. Kevin Tomsovic and Prof. Seddik Djouadi, who collaborated with me on this NSF project and taught me the basics of power systems and automatic control. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family: without their full support, I could not have written this book.