Improving Estimation Performance in Networked Control Systems Applying the Send-on-delta Transmission Method

This paper is concerned with improving performance of a state estimationproblem over a network in which a send-on-delta (SOD) transmission method is used. TheSOD method requires that a sensor node transmit data to the estimator node only if itsmeasurement value changes more than a given specified δ value. This method has beenexplored and applied by researchers because of its efficiency in the network bandwidthimprovement. However, when this method is used, it is not ensured that the estimator nodereceives data from the sensor nodes regularly at every estimation period. Therefore, wepropose a method to reduce estimation error in case of no sensor data reception. When theestimator node does not receive data from the sensor node, the sensor value is known to bein a (-δ_i , δ_i ) interval from the last transmitted sensor value. This implicit information hasbeen used to improve estimation performance in previous studies. The main contribution ofthis paper is to propose an algorithm, where the sensor value interval is reduced to(-δ_i / 2, δ_i / 2) in certain situations. Thus, the proposed algorithm improves the overallestimation performance without any changes in the send-on-delta algorithms of the sensornodes. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate the feasibility and the usefulness ofthe proposed method.