Effects of time delay on feedback stabilisation over signal-to-noise ratio constrained channels

The expanding integration of control and communication networks in recent years has generated an increasing interest in control problems with feedback over a communication channel. Significant research activity has concentrated on stabilisation in face of channel effects such as quantisation and data-rate limits. In a recent paper, the authors have studied the problem of feedback stabilisation over a communication channel with a constraint on the admissible signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). It has been shown therein that for a delay-free, linear time-invariant feedback loop, a SNR constraint in the feedback channel imposes fundamental limitations in the ability to achieve closed-loop stability. The present paper extends these results by introducing a time-delay in the loop, and shows that the lowest SNR required for closed-loop stability increases by a factor that may grow exponentially with the time-delay and the unstable open loop poles of the system. This result contributes to the quantification of performance tradeoffs in integrated control and communication environments.