Resource management in cyber-physical systems

Cyber physical systems (CPSs) represent the new generation of systems as the integration of computational and physical resources with significant computation, sensing, communication, and control capabilities. Noting the limited battery energy, limited memory, and finite spectrum available in each wireless sensor node, development of more efficient resource allocation methods becomes critical in these networks. The question is whether the physical layer presents more opportunities for efficient resource allocation or whether medium access control is the place to implement such methods, or perhaps higher layers. This chapter attempts to answer this question by reviewing the state of the art in the literature and proposing some new ideas and future research directions to complement recent results. In particular, we review recent game theory approaches that not only optimize key performance metrics under system constraints but also make a balance between the system overall efficiency and fairness in the resource allocation policy. This fundamental study involves new policy design for scheduling, routing, and transmission for basic multiple access scenarios. It paves the way for designing and optimizing next-generation networks with an arbitrary number of mobile nodes having a wide range of capabilities, such that the overall performance of the system is kept as high as possible while the nodes with poor local conditions do not deprive from basic service requirements. A comprehensive study of recent results in the literature is provided to put this multidimensional optimization problem into the right context. Various examples and scenarios are introduced and some approaches to analyze them are discussed.