Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper:	SS-10.2
Session:	Sensing Reality and Communicating Bits
Time:	Friday, May 19, 10:20 - 10:40
Presentation:	Special Session Lecture
Topic:	Special Sessions: Sensing reality and communicating bits
Title:	Reliable Target Tracking with Unreliable Communications
Authors:	Venkatesh Saligrama, David Castanon, Boston University, United States
Abstract:	We consider the problem of distributed target tracking of a linear dynamical system via networked sensors. Our setup consists of a set of sensors connected to a fusion center by means of communication links. Unreliable communication channels leads to communication delays and loss of information. To address this problem we model the arrival of messages from the sensors to the fusion center by a random process. The question arises as to what messages to encode for the fusion center. One possibility that has recently received much attention is to transmit local observations to the fusion center, which then fuses these intermittent observations through Kalman Filtering techniques. In contrast we develop a scheme for fusion of intermittent local sensor state estimates. The salient aspects of scheme are: (a) Efficiency, i.e., covariance of local estimate is no larger than covariance of observation; (b) Robustness, i.e., the error covariance is bounded with high probability even under vanishing link-connectivity. In contrast fusion of intermittent observations leads to unbounded errors even for moderate values for link-connectivity; (c) Scalable performance, i.e., a K-node sensor network with $K$ guaranteed communication links is significantly inferior to an N-node sensor network with $K$ functioning communication links on an average.