Distributed state estimation in sensor networks with randomly occurring nonlinearities subject to time delays

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the links below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM.This article is concerned with a new distributed state estimation problem for a class of dynamical systems in sensor networks. The target plant is described by a set of differential equations disturbed by a Brownian motion and randomly occurring nonlinearities (RONs) subject to time delays. The RONs are investigated here to reflect network-induced randomly occurring regulation of the delayed states on the current ones. Through available measurement output transmitted from the sensors, a distributed state estimator is designed to estimate the states of the target system, where each sensor can communicate with the neighboring sensors according to the given topology by means of a directed graph. The state estimation is carried out in a distributed way and is therefore applicable to online application. By resorting to the Lyapunov functional combined with stochastic analysis techniques, several delay-dependent criteria are established that not only ensure the estimation error to be globally asymptotically stable in the mean square, but also guarantee the existence of the desired estimator gains that can then be explicitly expressed when certain matrix inequalities are solved. A numerical example is given to verify the designed distributed state estimators.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61028008, 60804028 and 61174136, the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province of China, the Project sponsored by SRF for ROCS of SEM of China, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Optimal Sensor Collaboration for Parameter Tracking Using Energy Harvesting Sensors

In this paper, we design an optimal sensor collaboration strategy among neighboring nodes while tracking a time-varying parameter using wireless sensor networks in the presence of imperfect communication channels. The sensor network is assumed to be self-powered, where sensors are equipped with energy harvesters that replenish energy from the environment. In order to minimize the mean square estimation error of parameter tracking, we propose an online sensor collaboration policy subject to real-time energy harvesting constraints. The proposed energy allocation strategy is computationally light and only relies on the second-order statistics of the system parameters. For this, we first consider an offline non-convex optimization problem, which is solved exactly using semidefinite programming. Based on the offline solution, we design an online power allocation policy that requires minimal online computation and satisfies the dynamics of energy flow at each sensor. We prove that the proposed online policy is asymptotically equivalent to the optimal offline solution and show its convergence rate and robustness. We empirically show that the estimation performance of the proposed online scheme is better than that of the online scheme when channel state information about the dynamical system is available in the low SNR regime. Numerical results are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach

Recent advances on recursive filtering and sliding mode design for networked nonlinear stochastic systems: A survey

Copyright © 2013 Jun Hu et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Some recent advances on the recursive filtering and sliding mode design problems for nonlinear stochastic systems with network-induced phenomena are surveyed. The network-induced phenomena under consideration mainly include missing measurements, fading measurements, signal quantization, probabilistic sensor delays, sensor saturations, randomly occurring nonlinearities, and randomly occurring uncertainties. With respect to these network-induced phenomena, the developments on filtering and sliding mode design problems are systematically reviewed. In particular, concerning the network-induced phenomena, some recent results on the recursive filtering for time-varying nonlinear stochastic systems and sliding mode design for time-invariant nonlinear stochastic systems are given, respectively. Finally, conclusions are proposed and some potential future research works are pointed out.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant nos. 61134009, 61329301, 61333012, 61374127 and 11301118, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) of the UK under Grant no. GR/S27658/01, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Distributed state estimation for discrete-time sensor networks with randomly varying nonlinearities and missing measurements

Copyright [2011] IEEE. This material is posted here with permission of the IEEE. Such permission of the IEEE does not in any way imply IEEE endorsement of any of Brunel University's products or services. Internal or personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution must be obtained from the IEEE by writing to [email protected]. By choosing to view this document, you agree to all provisions of the copyright laws protecting it.This paper deals with the distributed state estimation problem for a class of sensor networks described by discrete-time stochastic systems with randomly varying nonlinearities and missing measurements. In the sensor network, there is no centralized processor capable of collecting all the measurements from the sensors, and therefore each individual sensor needs to estimate the system state based not only on its own measurement but also on its neighboring sensors' measurements according to certain topology. The stochastic Brownian motions affect both the dynamical plant and the sensor measurement outputs. The randomly varying nonlinearities and missing measurements are introduced to reflect more realistic dynamical behaviors of the sensor networks that are caused by noisy environment as well as by probabilistic communication failures. Through available output measurements from each individual sensor, we aim to design distributed state estimators to approximate the states of the networked dynamic system. Sufficient conditions are presented to guarantee the convergence of the estimation error systems for all admissible stochastic disturbances, randomly varying nonlinearities, and missing measurements. Then, the explicit expressions of individual estimators are derived to facilitate the distributed computing of state estimation from each sensor. Finally, a numerical example is given to verify the theoretical results.This work was supported in part by the Royal Society of U.K., the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 60804028 and Grant 61028008, the Teaching and Research Fund for Excellent Young Teachers at Southeast University of China, the Qing Lan Project of Jiangsu Province of China, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of China under Grant 2009DFA32050, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Event-based security control for discrete-time stochastic systems

This study is concerned with the event-based security control problem for a class of discrete-time stochastic systems with multiplicative noises subject to both randomly occurring denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and randomly occurring deception attacks. An event-triggered mechanism is adopted with hope to reduce the communication burden, where the measurement signal is transmitted only when a certain triggering condition is violated. A novel attack model is proposed to reflect the randomly occurring behaviours of the DoS attacks as well as the deception attacks within a unified framework via two sets of Bernoulli distributed white sequences with known conditional probabilities. A new concept of mean-square security domain is put forward to quantify the security degree. The authors aim to design an output feedback controller such that the closed-loop system achieves the desired security. By using the stochastic analysis techniques, some sufficient conditions are established to guarantee the desired security requirement and the control gain is obtained by solving some linear matrix inequalities with nonlinear constraints. A simulation example is utilised to illustrate the usefulness of the proposed controller design scheme.This work was supported in part by Royal Society of the UK, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61573246 and 61374039, the Shanghai Rising-Star Programme of China under Grant 16QA1403000, the Program for Capability Construction of Shanghai Provincial Universities under Grant 15550502500 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Distributed Stochastic Subgradient Optimization Algorithms Over Random and Noisy Networks

We study distributed stochastic optimization by networked nodes to cooperatively minimize a sum of convex cost functions. The network is modeled by a sequence of time-varying random digraphs with each node representing a local optimizer and each edge representing a communication link. We consider the distributed subgradient optimization algorithm with noisy measurements of local cost functions' subgradients, additive and multiplicative noises among information exchanging between each pair of nodes. By stochastic Lyapunov method, convex analysis, algebraic graph theory and martingale convergence theory, it is proved that if the local subgradient functions grow linearly and the sequence of digraphs is conditionally balanced and uniformly conditionally jointly connected, then proper algorithm step sizes can be designed so that all nodes' states converge to the global optimal solution almost surely