IoT Thrust Seminar - Integrating Communications, Sensing and Control in Cyber Physical Systems: From Pareto to Maxwell
The operation of cyber physical systems (CPSs), such as advanced aerial mobility (AAM) and smart grids, involves the interactions among communications, sensing and control. For better understanding and designing CPSs, unified frameworks and methodologies are in pressing needs. The interactions between communications and sensing/control are discussed in the talk, respectively: (a) Joint communications and radar sensing: The same electromagnetic (EM) wave can carry communication information to data receiver and bring back sensing information upon reflection, thus completing the two functions in the same round of transmission, thus substantially improving the spectrum and power efficiencies. The trade-off between communication and sensing performances is characterized using the Pareto front. (b) Communications and control: The disorderliness of the physical dynamics can be measured by the entropy, which spontaneously increases due to the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The information conveyed from communication network can be considered as negative entropy that compensates the entropy increase, while the controller is modeled as the Maxwell’s demon that reduces the entropy in the physical dynamics. The information efficiency, defined as the ratio between entropy reduction and information provided by communications, has been proved to be bounded by 1, similarly to the Carnot heat engine in thermodynamics. Both analyses provide intuitive and mathematically elegant frameworks for the development of joint communications, sensing and control in CPS.
Dr. Husheng Li received the BS and MS degrees in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, in 2005. From 2005 to 2007, he worked as a Senior Engineer at Qualcomm Inc., San Diego, CA. In 2007, he joined the EECS department of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, as an Assistant Professor. He is promoted to Associate Professor and Full Professor in 2013 and 2019, respectively. His research is mainly focused on statistical signal processing, wireless communications, networking, smart grid and game theory. Dr. Li is the recipient of the Best Paper Awards of EURASIP Journal of Wireless Communications and Networks, 2005, EURASIP Journal of Advances in Signal Processing, 2015, IEEE Globecom 2017, IEEE ICC 2011 and IEEE SmartGridComm 2012, the Best Demo Award of IEEE Globecom, 2010, and the Professional Research Award, Tickle College of Engineering, the University of Tennessee, 2017.