Distributed filtering for sensor networks with switching topology

In this article, the distributed H∞ filtering problem is investigated for a class of sensor networks under topology switching. The main purpose is to design the distributed H∞ filter that allows one to regulate the sensor's working modes. Firstly, a switched system model is proposed to reflect the working mode change of the sensors. Then, a stochastic sequence is adopted to model the packet dropout phenomenon occurring in the channels from the plant to the networked sensors. By utilising the Lyapunov functional method and stochastic analysis, some sufficient conditions are established to ensure that the filtering error system is mean-square exponentially stable with a prescribed H∞ performance level. Furthermore, the filter parameters are determined by solving a set of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Our results relates the decay rate of the filtering error system to the switching frequency of the topology directly and shows the existence of such a distributed filter when the topology is not varying very frequently, which is helpful for the sensor state regulation. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed design method is demonstrated by two numerical examples.