Search

This paper studies transmission scheduling for remote state estimation in the presence of an eavesdropper. A sensor transmits local state estimates over a packet dropping link to a remote estimator, while an eavesdropper can successfully overhear each sensor transmission with a certain probability. The objective is to determine when the sensor should transmit, in order to minimize the estimation error covariance at the remote estimator, while trying to keep the eavesdropper error covariance above a certain level. This is done by solving an optimization problem that minimizes a linear combination of the expected estimation error covariance and the negative of the expected eavesdropper error covariance. Structural results on the optimal transmission policy are derived, and shown to exhibit thresholding behavior in the estimation error covariances. In the infinite horizon situation, it is shown that with unstable systems one can keep the expected estimation error covariance bounded while the expected eavesdropper error covariance becomes unbounded, for all eavesdropping probabilities strictly less than one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a remote state estimation problem with multiple sensors observing a dynamical process, where sensors transmit local state estimates over an independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) packet dropping channel to a remote estimator. At every discrete time instant, the remote estimator decides whether each sensor should transmit or not, with each sensor transmission incurring a fixed energy cost. The channel is shared such that collisions will occur if more than one sensor transmits at a time. Performance is quantified via an optimization problem that minimizes a convex combination of the expected estimation error covariance at the remote estimator and expected energy usage across the sensors. For transmission schedules dependent only on the estimation error covariance at the remote estimator, this work establishes structural results on the optimal scheduling which show that: 1) for unstable systems, if the error covariance is large then a sensor will always be scheduled to transmit and 2) there is a threshold-type behavior in switching from one sensor transmitting to another. Specializing to the single sensor case, these structural results demonstrate that a threshold policy (i.e., transmit if the error covariance exceeds a certain threshold and don't transmit otherwise) is optimal. We also consider the situation where sensors transmit measurements instead of state estimates, and establish structural results including the optimality of threshold policies for the single sensor, scalar case. These results provide a theoretical justification for the use of such threshold policies in variance based event triggered estimation. Numerical studies confirm the qualitative behavior predicted by our structural results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate network topology reconfiguration in wireless sensor networks for remote state estimation, where sensor observations are transmitted, possibly via intermediate sensors, to a central gateway/estimator. The time-varying wireless network environment is modelled by the notion of a network state process, which is a randomly time-varying semi-Markov chain and determines the packet reception probabilities of links at different times. For each network state, different network configurations can be used, which govern the network topology and routing of packets. The problem addressed is to determine the optimal network configuration to use in each network state, in order to minimize an expected error covariance measure. Computation of the expected error covariance cost function has a complexity of O(2 \Delta\max), where M is the number of sensors and \Delta_{\max} is the maximum time between transitions of the semi-Markov chain. A sub-optimal method which minimizes the upper bound of the expected error covariance, that can be computed with a reduced complexity of O(2^{M})$, is proposed, which in many cases gives identical results to the optimal method. Conditions for estimator stability under both the optimal and suboptimal reconfiguration methods are derived using stochastic Lyapunov functions. Numerical results and comparisons with other low complexity approaches demonstrate the performance benefits of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This note studies the use of relays to improve the performance of Kalman filtering over packet dropping links. Packet reception probabilities are governed by time-varying fading channel gains, and the sensor and relay transmit powers. We consider situations with multiple sensors and relays, where each relay can either forward one of the sensors' measurements to the gateway/fusion center, or perform a simple linear network coding operation on some of the sensor measurements. Using an expected error covariance performance measure, we consider optimal and suboptimal methods for finding the best relay configuration, and power control problems for optimizing the Kalman filter performance. Our methods show that significant performance gains can be obtained through the use of relays, network coding and power control, with at least 30–40% less power consumption for a given expected error covariance specification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a design methodology for optimal transmission energy allocation at a sensor equipped with energy harvesting technology for remote state estimation of linear stochastic dynamical systems. In this framework, the sensor measurements as noisy versions of the system states are sent to the receiver over a packet dropping communication channel. The packet dropout probabilities of the channel depend on both the sensor's transmission energies and time varying wireless fading channel gains. The sensor has access to an energy harvesting source which is an everlasting but unreliable energy source compared to conventional batteries with fixed energy storages. The receiver performs optimal state estimation with random packet dropouts to minimize the estimation error covariances based on received measurements. The receiver also sends packet receipt acknowledgments to the sensor via an erroneous feedback communication channel which is itself packet dropping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]