Consistent Distributed Track Fusion Under Communication Constraints

This paper addresses the problem of retrieving consistent estimates in a distributed network where the communication between the nodes is constrained such that only the diagonal elements of the covariance matrix are allowed to be exchanged. Several methods are developed for preserving and/or recovering consistency under the constraints imposed by the communication protocol. The proposed methods are used in conjunction with the covariance intersection method and the estimation performance is evaluated based on information usage and consistency. The results show that among the proposed methods, consistency can be preserved equally well at the transmitting node as at the receiving node.