Hazem Said

Amr Alanwar, Victor Gassmann, Xingkang He et al.

The set-based estimation has gained a lot of attention due to its ability to guarantee state enclosures for safety-critical systems. However, collecting measurements from distributed sensors often requires outsourcing the set-based operations to an aggregator node, raising many privacy concerns. To address this problem, we present set-based estimation protocols using partially homomorphic encryption that preserve the privacy of the measurements and sets bounding the estimates. We consider a linear discrete-time dynamical system with bounded modeling and measurement uncertainties. Sets are represented by zonotopes and constrained zonotopes as they can compactly represent high-dimensional sets and are closed under linear maps and Minkowski addition. By selectively encrypting parameters of the set representations, we establish the notion of encrypted sets and intersect sets in the encrypted domain, which enables guaranteed state estimation while ensuring privacy. In particular, we show that our protocols achieve computational privacy using the cryptographic notion of computational indistinguishability. We demonstrate the efficiency of our approach by localizing a real mobile quadcopter using ultra-wideband wireless devices.

Amr Alanwar, Hazem Said, Ankur Mehta et al.

Distributed state estimation strongly depends on collaborative signal processing, which often requires excessive communication and computation to be executed on resource-constrained sensor nodes. To address this problem, we propose an event-triggered diffusion Kalman filter, which collects measurements and exchanges messages between nodes based on a local signal indicating the estimation error. On this basis, we develop an energy-aware state estimation algorithm that regulates the resource consumption in wireless networks and ensures the effectiveness of every consumed resource. The proposed algorithm does not require the nodes to share its local covariance matrices, and thereby allows considerably reducing the number of transmission messages. To confirm its efficiency, we apply the proposed algorithm to the distributed simultaneous localization and time synchronization problem and evaluate it on a physical testbed of a mobile quadrotor node and stationary custom ultra-wideband wireless devices. The obtained experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm allows saving 86% of the communication overhead associated with the original diffusion Kalman filter while causing deterioration of performance by 16% only. We make the Matlab code and the real testing data available online.