This note studies the use of relays to improve the performance of Kalman
filtering over packet dropping links. Packet reception probabilities are
governed by time-varying fading channel gains, and the sensor and relay
transmit powers. We consider situations with multiple sensors and relays, where
each relay can either forward one of the sensors' measurements to the
gateway/fusion center, or perform a simple linear network coding operation on
some of the sensor measurements. Using an expected error covariance performance
measure, we consider optimal and suboptimal methods for finding the best relay
configuration, and power control problems for optimizing the Kalman filter
performance. Our methods show that significant performance gains can be
obtained through the use of relays, network coding and power control, with at
least 30-40% less power consumption for a given expected error covariance
specification.Comment: 7 page