Optimal state estimation in the presence of communication costs and packet drops

  • Authors:
  • Gabriel M. Lipsa;Nuno C. Martins

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of ECE and ISR, University of Maryland, College Park;Department of ECE and ISR, University of Maryland, College Park

  • Venue:
  • Allerton'09 Proceedings of the 47th annual Allerton conference on Communication, control, and computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Consider a first order, linear and time-invariant discrete time system driven by Gaussian, zero mean white process noise, a pre-processor that accepts noisy measurements of the state of the system, and an estimator. The pre-processor and the estimator are not co-located, and, at every time-step, the pre-processor sends either a real number or an erasure symbol to the estimator. We seek the pre-processor and the estimator that jointly minimize a cost that combines three terms; the expected estimation error and a communication cost. The communication cost is zero for erasure symbols and a pre-selected constant otherwise. We show that the optimal pre-processor follows a symmetric threshold policy, and that the optimal estimator is a Kalman-like filter that updates its estimate linearly in the presence of erasures. Other existing work has adopted such a Kalman-like structure, but this paper is the first to prove its optimality.