The paper presents the gossip interactive Kalman filter (GIKF) for
distributed Kalman filtering for networked systems and sensor networks, where
inter-sensor communication and observations occur at the same time-scale. The
communication among sensors is random; each sensor occasionally exchanges its
filtering state information with a neighbor depending on the availability of
the appropriate network link. We show that under a weak distributed
detectability condition:
1. the GIKF error process remains stochastically bounded, irrespective of the
instability properties of the random process dynamics; and
2. the network achieves \emph{weak consensus}, i.e., the conditional
estimation error covariance at a (uniformly) randomly selected sensor converges
in distribution to a unique invariant measure on the space of positive
semi-definite matrices (independent of the initial state.)
To prove these results, we interpret the filtered states (estimates and error
covariances) at each node in the GIKF as stochastic particles with local
interactions. We analyze the asymptotic properties of the error process by
studying as a random dynamical system the associated switched (random) Riccati
equation, the switching being dictated by a non-stationary Markov chain on the
network graph.Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions, 30 pages