Distributed recursive fault estimation with binary encoding schemes over sensor networks

In this paper, we investigate the distributed recursive fault estimation problem for a class of discrete time-varying systems with binary encoding schemes over a sensor network. The fault signal with zero second-order difference is taken into account to reflect the sensor failures. Since the communication bandwidth in practice is constrained, the binary encoding schemes are exploited to regulate the signal transmission from the neighbouring sensors to the local fault estimator. In addition, due to the influence of channel noises, each bit might change with a small crossover probability. In the presence of sensor faults and bit errors, an upper bound for the estimation error covariance matrix is ensured and minimized at each time step via designing the gain matrices of the estimator. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by a simulation.