Sensor data scheduling for optimal state estimation with communication energy constraint

In this paper, we consider sensor data scheduling with communication energy constraint. A sensor has to decide whether to send its data to a remote estimator or not due to the limited available communication energy. We construct effective sensor data scheduling schemes that minimize the estimation error and satisfy the energy constraint. Two scenarios are studied: the sensor has sufficient computation capability and the sensor has limited computation capability. For the first scenario, we are able to construct the optimal scheduling scheme. For the second scenario, we are able to provide lower and upper bounds of the minimum error and construct a scheduling scheme whose estimation error falls within the bounds. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.