Collaborative Estimation and Actuation for Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs) facilitate close interactions between human and the environment. Efficient coordination among the sensors and actuators plays a vital role in carrying out sensing and acting in WSANs. In this paper, we develop a collaborative estimation and actuation mechanism, which consists of a sensor-actuator coordination phase and an actuator-actuator coordination phase. The first phase is based on distributed Kalman filter in federated configuration, which is able to provide reliable and precise sensing data. On this basis, the second phase allocates proper tasks based on system requirements and coordinates actuators to accomplish the tasks. Particularly, the actuator-actuator coordination is formulated as an optimization problem and an effective method is proposed to search the solution based on sequential unconstrained minimization technique. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism.