On the Design of Resilient Distributed Single Time-Scale Estimators: A Graph-Theoretic Approach

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graph-theoretic approach to designing resilient distributed estimators that maintain stability despite sensor or communication failures, improving robustness and reducing communication load.

Contribution

It proposes novel resilient estimation techniques that relax network connectivity requirements and eliminate inner consensus loops, enhancing robustness against failures.

Findings

Proves Schur stability under up to q sensor or link failures.

Introduces q-node and q-link connectivity concepts for robustness.

Reduces communication load compared to existing estimators.

Abstract

Distributed estimation in interconnected systems has gained increasing attention due to its relevance in diverse applications such as sensor networks, autonomous vehicles, and cloud computing. In real practice, the sensor network may suffer from communication and/or sensor failures. This might be due to cyber-attacks, faults, or environmental conditions. Distributed estimation resilient to such conditions is the topic of this paper. By representing the sensor network as a graph and exploiting its inherent structural properties, we introduce novel techniques that enhance the robustness of distributed estimators. As compared to the literature, the proposed estimator (i) relaxes the network connectivity of most existing single time-scale estimators and (ii) reduces the communication load of the existing double time-scale estimators by avoiding the inner consensus loop. On the other hand, the sensors might be subject to faults or attacks, resulting in biased measurements. Removing these sensor data may result in observability loss. Therefore, we propose resilient design on the definitions of $q$-node-connectivity and $q$-link-connectivity, which capture robust strong-connectivity under link or sensor node failure. By proper design of the sensor network, we prove Schur stability of the proposed distributed estimation protocol under failure of up to $q$ sensors or $q$ communication links.