Distributed Kalman filtering fusion with packet loss or intermittent communications from local estimators to fusion center

This paper considers the distributed Kalman filtering fusion with passive packet loss or initiative intermittent communications from local estimators to a fusion center while the process noise does exist. We present a specific condition-properly short intermittent communication period/packet loss under which a proposed optimal distributed algorithm can be equivalent to the corresponding centralized Kalman filtering fusion with complete communications even if the process noise does exist. When this condition is not satisfied, using some recent results, a suboptimal distributed fusion algorithm is motivated. Numerical examples show that this algorithm still works well and significantly better than the standard distributed Kalman filtering fusion with a proper modification due to packet loss even if the condition is violated strongly.