Estimation from a multisensor environment for systems with multiple packet dropouts and correlated measurement noises

This paper addresses the problem of distributed fusion estimation from measurements with packet dropouts and cross-correlated noises acquired from different sensors. Assuming that the packet dropouts are modelled by independent Bernoulli random variables with different characteristics for each sensor and that measurement noises are cross-correlated at the same and at consecutive sampling times, filtering and smoothing algorithms are derived using the distributed fusion method. The distributed fusion filter and smoother are obtained as a matrix-weighted linear combination of corresponding local least-squares linear estimators, verifying that the mean squared error is minimum. The local linear filtering and fixed-point smoothing algorithms are derived using the first and second-order moments of the signal and the noises present in the observation model. Simulation results are provided to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed algorithms, using the error estimation covariance matrices as measure of the quality of the estimators.