  An important class of cyber-physical systems relies on multiple agents that
jointly perform a task by coordinating their actions over a wireless network.
Examples include self-driving cars in intelligent transportation and production
robots in smart manufacturing. However, the scalability of existing
control-over-wireless solutions is limited as they cannot resolve overload
situations in which the communication demand exceeds the available bandwidth.
This paper presents a novel co-design of distributed control and wireless
communication that overcomes this limitation by dynamically allocating the
available bandwidth to agents with the greatest need to communicate.
Experiments on a real cyber-physical testbed with 20 agents, each consisting of
a low-power wireless embedded device and a cart-pole system, demonstrate that
our solution achieves significantly better control performance under overload
than the state of the art. We further prove that our co-design guarantees
closed-loop stability for physical systems with stochastic linear
time-invariant dynamics.
