Horizontal Estimation for the Solution of Multitarget Multisensor Tracking Problems

In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in both the variety and number of sensors which need to be tied together. A distributed estimation architecture for Distributed Sensors Networks (DSN) is introduced. It is called Horizontal Estimation Architecture (HEA). The term horizontal is used to imply that the geographically dispersed nodes do not differ in rank and are peer-to-peer coupled. Each node is connected by a data link to its neighbors (where possible), thus providing a mesh network topology. The introduced HEA has four major components: the local estimator, the information fusion process (both together are called horizontal estimator), the network access protocol, and the control policy. The HEA techniques are applied to the solution of multitarget-multisensor tracking problems in an air-surveillance system emphasizing information fusion. An expert system approach for information fusion has been presented. Through the HEA application its main features and practical usefulness are addressed.