Hierarchical Fusion Estimation for Clustered Asynchronous Sensor Networks

In this note, a hierarchical fusion estimation method is presented for clustered sensor networks with a very general setup where sensors (sensor nodes) and estimators (cluster heads) are allowed to work asynchronously with aperiodic sampling and estimation rates. A sequential measurement fusion (SMF) method is presented to design local estimators, and it is shown that the SMF estimator is equivalent to the measurement augmentation (MA) estimator in precision but with much lower computational complexity. Two types of sequential covariance intersection (CI) fusion estimators are presented for the fusion estimation. The proposed SCI fusion estimators provide a satisfactory estimation precision that is close to the centralized batch CI (BCI) estimator while requiring smaller computational burden as compared with the BCI estimator. Therefore, the proposed hierarchical fusion estimation method is suitable for real-time applications in asynchronous sensor networks with energy constraints. Moreover, the method is applicable to the case with packet delays and losses.