Distributed UFIR Filtering with Applications to Environmental Monitoring

Abstract

Environmental monitoring requires an analysis of large and reliable amount of data collected through node stations distributed over a very wide area. Equipment used in such stations are often expensive that limits the amount of sensing stations to be deployed. The technology known as Wireless Sensor Networks (WNS) is a viable option to deliver low-cost sensor information. However, unpredictable issues such as interference from electromagnetic sources, damaged and unstable sensors and the landscape itself may cause the network to suffer from unstable links as well as missing and corrupted data. Therefore robust estimators are required to mitigate such effects. In this sense,the unbiased finite impulse response (UFIR) filter is used as a robust estimator for applications over WSN, especially when the process statistics are unknown. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of the distributed UFIR (dUFIR) filter with optimal consensus on estimates against missing and incorrect data. The dUFIR algorithm is tested in two different scenarios of very unstable WSN using real data. It is shown that the dUFIR filteris more suitable for real life applications requiring the robustness against missing and corrupted measurements under the unknown noise statistics.