Networked Estimation with an Area-Triggered Transmission Method

This paper is concerned with the networked estimation problem in which sensor data are transmitted over the network. In the event-driven sampling scheme known as level-crossing or send-on-delta, sensor data are transmitted to the estimator node if the difference between the current sensor value and the last transmitted one is greater than a given threshold. The event-driven sampling generally requires less transmission than the time-driven one. However, the transmission rate of the send-on-delta method becomes large when the sensor noise is large since sensor data variation becomes large due to the sensor noise. Motivated by this issue, we propose another event-driven sampling method called area-triggered in which sensor data are sent only when the integral of differences between the current sensor value and the last transmitted one is greater than a given threshold. Through theoretical analysis and simulation results, we show that in the certain cases the proposed method not only reduces data transmission rate but also improves estimation performance in comparison with the conventional event-driven method.