Distributed filtering in sensor networks with randomly occurring saturations and successive packet dropouts

This paper is concerned with the distributed H-infinity filtering problem for a class of nonlinear systems with randomly occurring sensor saturations (ROSS) and successive packet dropouts in sensor networks. The issue of ROSS is brought up to account for the random nature of sensor saturations in a networked environment of sensors, and accordingly, a novel sensor model is proposed to describe both the ROSS and successive packet dropouts within a unified framework. Two sets of Bernoulli distributed white sequences are introduced to govern the random occurrences of the sensor saturations and successive packet dropouts. Through available output measurements from not only the individual sensor but also its neighboring sensors, a sufficient condition is established for the desired distributed filter to ensure that the filtering dynamics is exponentially mean-square stable and the prescribed H-infinity performance constraint is satisfied. The solution of the distributed filter gains is characterized by solving an auxiliary convex optimization problem. Finally, a simulation example is provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed filtering scheme. Copyright (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.