On Sensor Fusion in the Presence of Communication Channels

In this paper we look at the problem of multisensor data fusion when data is being communicated over channels that drop packets randomly. We are motivated by the use of wireless links for communication among nodes in upcoming sensor networks. We wish to identify the information that should be communicated by each node to others given that some of the information it had transmitted earlier might have been lost. We show that it is sufficient to send state estimates based on local information and show how each node can fuse all the state estimates it receives from other nodes to generate a global state estimate that is optimal in the mean square sense.