Event-Triggered Distributed Estimation With Decaying Communication Rate

Abstract: We study distributed estimation of a high-dimensional static parameter vector through a group of sensors whose communication network is modeled by a fixed directed graph. Different from existing time-triggered communication schemes, an event-triggered asynchronous scheme is investigated in order to reduce communication while preserving estimation convergence. A distributed estimation algorithm with a single step size is first proposed based on an event-triggered communication scheme with a time-dependent decaying threshold. With the event-triggered scheme, each sensor sends its estimate to neighbor sensors only when the difference between the current estimate and the last sent-out estimate is larger than the triggering threshold. We prove that the proposed algorithm has mean-square and almost-sure convergence respectively, under an integrated condition of sensor network topology and sensor measurement matrices. The condition is satisfied if the topology is a balanced digraph containing a spanning tree and the system is collectively observable. Moreover, we provide estimates for the convergence rates, which are related to the step size as well as the triggering threshold. Furthermore, as an essential metric of sensor communication intensity in the event-triggered distributed algorithms, the communication rate is proved to decay to zero with a certain speed almost surely as time goes to infinity. We show that given the step size, adjusting the decay speed of the triggering threshold can lead to a tradeoff between the convergence rate of the estimation error and the decay speed of the communication rate. Specifically, increasing the decay speed of the threshold would make the communication rate decay faster, but reduce the convergence rate of the estimation error. Numerical simulations are provided to illustrate the developed results.