Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Distributed Target Tracking And Synchronization In Wireless Sensor Networks, Jichuan Li

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Wireless sensor networks provide useful information for various applications but pose challenges in scalable information processing and network maintenance. This dissertation focuses on statistical methods for distributed information fusion and sensor synchronization for target tracking in wireless sensor networks.

We perform target tracking using particle filtering. For scalability, we extend centralized particle filtering to distributed particle filtering via distributed fusion of local estimates provided by individual sensors. We derive a distributed fusion rule from Bayes' theorem and implement it via average consensus. We approximate each local estimate as a Gaussian mixture and develop a sampling-based approach to the nonlinear fusion …