Convergence properties of distributed estimators for heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually deployed for monitoring systems with the distributed detection and estimation of sensors. A consensus based estimation method is proposed in this paper for heterogeneous WSNs with two types of sensors. The convergence properties of the proposed estimators are analyzed under time-varying inputs. It is shown that the kind of sensors with high processing ability can exponentially converge to time-varying ambience signals with a bounded error ball. The radius of the ball can be obtained by a minimization problem. The results also imply that network topology has a great impact on the convergence of the distributed estimators. The simulation study illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method.