Coordination of Communication in Distrihuted Sensing Systems

Contents

This paper describes an algorithm for coordination of communication of probabilistic information in distributed sensing systems. We envision the distributed sensing system as a team of observers, each of which observes locally and communicate with other members in order to improve its local estimation. Due to the limited communication bandwidth and constraints imposed by the network topology, communicating all information with each other is inefficient/infeasible. By quantifying information which is communicated anmng the members, the problem of coordination of communication is considered in the framework of team decision theory. By maximizing the expected overall information throughput in the distributed sensor m.twork under resource and topological constraints, decisious rules can be obtained for each sensor member on "how much to communicate". Two simple examples of distributed tracking system are presented.