Distributed Field Estimation Algorithms in Vehicular Sensor Networks

This paper deals with cooperative reconstruction of environmental variables (e.g., temperature) along a road by a vehicular sensor network using wireless communication. Vehicles take repeated measurements and approximate the environment using a set of basis functions. We investigate the applicability and performance of popular averaging techniques (gossiping and consensus propagation) on the basis coefficients, and propose a simpler approach to avoid divergence problems. We have developed a graphical simulation environment to study the behavior of different algorithms in this scenario and we show simulation results which support our simplified approach.