Cooperative Communications and Control

The idea of using local broadcast capability of wireless communications with ideas on distributed estimation and control could be a good one for some new ideas. In particular, in the context of sensor networks, it would be interesting to think about how to do distributed Kalman filtering when local measurements were available to a group of sensors at the same time. One would want this to be robust with respect to lost information at some nodes (eg, a fading channel that caused packet loss) and at the same time show that the overall system converged quickly to the estimated state. Convergence would probably be a function of the connectivity, which would depend on the transmit power, which is something one could update adaptively.