Selective Measurement Transmission in Distributed Estimation With Data Association

In distributed multisensor estimation/tracking the problem of fusion is complicated by that of data association (i.e., with false alarms and missed detections): not only is it of concern to provide an estimation-efficient sensor level quantization of the “target-originated” measurement, but it is also unclear which among each sensor's measurements this might be, if any at all. The former issue has been studied previously; in this paper we address only the latter concern. At first we assume that each sensor is tasked to communicate exactly one of its observations to a Fusion Center (FC) for a global estimate, and we work in one dimension. Via order statistics we show that, surprisingly, the nearest neighbor (NN) is not always the most appropriate measurement to share. We also expand our bandwidth to allow for transmission of multiple measurements, for example the nearest and third-nearest: it turns out that a single-measurement transmission is more bandwidth efficient than multiple. The analysis and results are further extended to two dimensions, but the moral-that sharing of the NNs is not always a good idea-remains.