Transmission rate conditions for distributed filtering in sensor networks against eavesdropper

This paper studies the distributed secure estimation problem of sensor networks (SNs) in the presence of eavesdroppers. In an SN, sensors communicate with each other through digital communication channels, and the eavesdropper overhears the messages transmitted by the sensors over fading wiretap channels. The increasing transmission rate plays a positive role in the detectability of the network while playing a negative role in the secrecy. Two types of SNs under two cooperative filtering algorithms are considered. For networks with collectively observable nodes and the Kalman filtering algorithm, by studying the topological entropy of sensing measurements, a sufficient condition of distributed detectability and secrecy, under which there exists a code–decode strategy such that the sensors’ estimation errors are bounded while the eavesdropper’s error grows unbounded, is given. For collectively observable SNs under the consensus Kalman filtering algorithm, by studying the topological entropy of the sensors’ covariance matrices, a necessary condition of distributed detectability and secrecy is provided. A simulation example is given to illustrate the results.