Kalman filtering with intermittent observations

Motivated by our experience in building sensor networks for navigation as part of the Networked Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) project at Berkeley, we consider the problem of performing Kalman filtering with intermittent observations. When data travel along unreliable communication channels in a large, wireless, multi-hop sensor network, the effect of communication delays and loss of information in the control loop cannot be neglected. We address this problem starting from the discrete Kalman filtering formulation, and modeling the arrival of the observation as a random process. We study the statistical convergence properties of the estimation error covariance, showing the existence of a critical value for the arrival rate of the observations, beyond which a transition to an unbounded error occurs.